PCI Security Standards

Managing Third-Party Risk With PCI Security Standards

While the payment card industry (PCI) is a perennial target for cyber criminals, PCI cybersecurity standards have proven to be extremely effective at providing cybersecurity protection for cardholder data and of businesses that accept card payments.

Failing to adhere to PCI security standards can have serious security, as well as legal, repercussions for a business – and for organizations to which it provides services as a vendor.

As you look to manage third-party risk, making sure your vendors are PCI security-compliant is essential for mitigating risk in your vendor ecosphere.

Traditional methods for measuring third-party risk only provide partial visibility into compliance with PCI security standards. That’s why a growing number of organizations are turning to Bitsight for solutions to continuously monitor and mitigate third-party risk in the supply chain.

The Challenge Of Monitoring Of PCI Security Compliance

PCI security standards comprise 15 cybersecurity standards that cover security practices, technologies, and processes to protect card payments.

These standards cover the entire payment card process, from implementing effective PIN security to card protection processes and software lifecycle management.

Organizations today in every industry are outsourcing more services and engaging more vendors. A growing number of these organizations are suffering data breaches that originate in the networks of third parties they work with.

For this reason, it’s critical that third-party risk managers take steps to ensure their vendors are PCI security compliant, as the trickle-down effect of a single vendor breach can be catastrophic.

In the past, risk managers have monitored compliance with PCI security standards through yearly audits and periodic assessments that are often conducted manually.

However, these methods can be time-consuming and since they rely on information provided by vendors themselves, these assessments are often subjective, inaccurate, or incomplete.

To mitigate risk by ensuring vendors are complying with PCI security standards, organizations need a way to monitor compliance year-round. Continuous monitoring enables third-party risk managers to take swift action when a vendor’s security posture weakens, or to avoid onboarding vendors who fail to comply with PCI security standards and other cyber security regulations.

Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management

Bitsight delivers capabilities that make it easy to continuously monitor compliance with PCI security standards.

Using Bitsight daily Security Ratings that provide a clear picture into each vendor’s security posture, Bitsight Third-Party Risk Management immediately exposes cyber risk within your supply chain so you can prioritize resources for remediation.

Bitsight Security Ratings provide insight into the riskiest issues in your vendors’ digital ecosystems, including noncompliance with PCI security standards.

In addition to an overall rating that correlates with risk of breach, Bitsight provides data on potential security incidents and grades on individual risk vectors.

Bitsight can even provide the specifics on where problems exist in an individual vendor’s network, helping to minimize the time and cost of remediation and to specifically locate specific types of risk that are breaching PCI security standards.

With Bitsight for Third-Party Risk Management, you will constantly have easy-to-understand ratings and cyber risk analytics that help you efficiently assess whether or not your vendors are meeting PCI security standards and other information security requirements, or whether they are putting your business at risk.

How Bitsight Security Ratings Show PCI Security Compliance

Bitsight Security Ratings use an outside-in approach to evaluating the security performance of organizations and their vendors. Issued daily, Bitsight ratings are a quantitative measurement of how well an organization is protected against breach.

Bitsight ratings range from 250 to 900, with the current achievable range being 300-820 – the higher the number, the more effective the vendor is at implementing good security practices and the lower the chance that they will experience a data breach.

To calculate security ratings, Bitsight gathers data from 120+ sources concerning 23 risk factors that fall into four categories: compromised systems, security diligence, user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches.

The sources in Bitsight’s proprietary method of data collection include both owned and licensed data, and all sources feature data that is externally available and verifiable.

By compiling, weighting, and prioritizing security data points using a proprietary algorithm, Bitsight generates a daily score for each company that represents an overall rating of its security posture.

Bitsight also provides 12+ months of historical data to identify trends, and enables risk managers to drill down into security performance on individual risk vectors as well. Additionally, Bitsight ratings can help organizations in cyber security risk modeling by projecting future ratings based on a given plan.

Bitsight Security Ratings are the only rating service that is independently verified to correlate to breach. In fact, companies with a Bitsight security rating of 500 or less are nearly 5 times more likely to have a breach than companies with a rating of 700 or more.

Why choose Bitsight?

An industry-leading solution

Bitsight is the world’s leading provider of cyber risk intelligence, transforming how security leaders manage and mitigate risk. Leveraging the most comprehensive external data and analytics, Bitsight empowers organizations to make confident, data-backed decisions and equips security and compliance teams from over 3,300 organizations across 70+ countries with the tools to proactively detect exposures and take immediate action to protect their enterprises and supply chains.

Bitsight customers include 38% of Fortune 500 companies, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and 180+ government agencies and quasi-governmental authorities, including U.S. and global financial regulators.

Extensive visibility

Bitsight operates one of the largest risk datasets in the world. Leveraging over 10 years of experience collecting, attributing, and assessing risk across millions of entities, we combine the power of AI with the curation of technical researchers to unlock an unparalleled view of your organization. Bitsight offers more complete visibility into important risk areas such as botnets, mobile apps, IoT systems, and more. Our cyber data collection and scanning capabilities include:

• 40 million+ monitored entities
• 540 billion+ cyber events in our data lake
• 4 billion+ routable IP addresses 
• 500 million+ domains monitored
• 400 billion+ events ingested daily
• 12+ months of historical data

Superior analytics

Bitsight offers a full analytics suite that addresses the challenges of peer comparison, digital risk exposure, and future performance.

Ratings validation

Bitsight is the only rating solution with third-party validation of correlation to breach from AIR Worldwide and IHS Markit.

Quantifiable outcomes

Bitsight drives proven ROI with significant operational efficiency and risk reduction outcomes.

Prioritization of risk vectors

Bitsight incorporates the criticality of risk vectors in to calculation of Security Ratings, highlighting risk in a more diversified way to ensure the most critical assets and vulnerabilities are ranked higher.

FAQs: What are PCI security standards?