Why Comply with PCI?
By John Robinson, of Cocard Synergy
It’s a Pain in the You-Know-What, but Necessary.
PCI seems daunting. I’m sure you’ve heard about it. To start, it’s actually PCI DSS that we’re concerned with, and that stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. “Data Security Standard” is the key here.
Basically, the idea is to prevent identity theft. You may remember the news about TJ Maxx and fellow TJX companies losing information for 45.7 million credit and debit cards. Yeesh! This was a couple years ago, and I bet they’re still shelling out for the fines incurred. I don’t recall the final numbers, but it was estimated TJX’s fines were between $4.5 and 8.6 BILLION (with a “b).
Now also think about the pain this caused for any affected cardholders whose identities were stolen.
As you can tell from the size of the fines, as well as thinking about the security of your own credit cards, keeping data safe is a high priority-for you, for the card companies, the PCI Security Council (put in place by Visa, MasterCard, Discover, JCB, and American Express), and the consumer.
This post is getting long already, but it’s important to know you MUST learn about PCI compliance for two reasons:Â 1)Â The Golden Rule-It’s just good sense to protect your customers, as you’d hope where you’re shopping protects you; and 2)Â There are heavy, heavy fines for not being compliant once you’ve been breached.
I’ll outline the steps to PCI Compliance tomorrow, but if you want to start investigating yourself, check out the PCI Security Council’s website, here or this rather good site, PCI Compliance Guide, that is a little more step-by-step, here.
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hi, andar here, i just read your post. i like very much. agree to you, sir.