With the increased number of businesses relying on card payment and the continually advancing technology, you may easily presume that merchants are winning the battle on their payment data protection. This is not the case.
A Verizon 2015 PCI Compliance Report confirms that the battle on fraud and threats to data security is far from won. Just about 20 percent of the total businesses surveyed managed to pass their latest PCI compliance assessments.
Even though the 2014 report presented a lower figure at only 10 percent, it is noteworthy that not even a single company has proven compliant at the moment of breach, out of all the breaches that were reported last year by Verizon.
It is required by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) that protection is given to cardholder data at all times and that strong authentication and access controls are put in place by all merchants. These requirements are both essential and are meant to help prevent incidents of data breach.
The report has further suggested that compliance is simply a baseline and minimum conventional standard across the industry and not exactly the highpoint of payment card security. This in a way suggests that companies need to take custom measures that meet or match their operations to enhance payment card security.
Attackers and fraudsters are notably advancing their game. And the apparent advancements in technology instead of helping the business community, seems to be working much to their (attackers’) advantage. They are currently working on the different compliance controls to keep being steps ahead of the security level attained by industry standards and regulation.
A more serious threat that should be ground for alarm to every merchant in the business marketplace is, invaders have made apparent moves from stealing payment card Industry (PCI) data onto seeking personally identifiable information (PII).
This means that they can actually impersonate the different cardholders and there is no limit to what they can do with such an advantage. Personally identifiable information can potentially be close to 50 times more valuable to them than just the cardholder records.
In light of such breaches, high-risk merchant accounts are invaluable. Merchants must be certain to open their accounts with secure service providers. Such merchants can get high-risk merchant account instant approval from First American Merchant.