Payment card security requirements feel like a pain the first time a merchant deals with them. There’s paperwork to complete, systems that need updating, scans to run, and security policies to write. It’s easy to assume that they’re just another set of rules designed to extract time and money from the business. What gets overlooked in all that convenience, should be taken seriously because they exist due to the expense, destruction, and unacceptability of card data breaches. The “annoying” merchant protections work that keeps card data breaches to a minimum has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars for breached merchants and their attorneys.
What Happens When Card Data is Compromised
There are far-reaching consequences when card data is compromised in a payment card security breach. The business affected pays for all the forensic investigations, business interrupts, notification, fines from the card brands, and even lawsuits from damaged parties. It gets expensive—data breaches can easily run well over a couple of hundred thousand dollars and some costs accumulate in millions of dollars in damages.
The direct consequences alone have multiple rippling effects on a business’s bottom line. Businesses lose the ability to process cards while investigations are underway. Payment processors close merchant accounts immediately when a breach is detected. For businesses that depend on card payments for survival, there’s no income during business interrupts. Bills don’t stop arriving; many firms never recover from the impact of a data breach.
Even after the dust has settled and the damage has been contained, the reputational damage lingers. Customers have long memories of which businesses lost their card data and where they no longer feel safe shopping. Competitors talk. Newspaper articles can be read and re-read online for years after the breach.
How Security Requirements Help Mitigate These Damages
PCI compliance requirements force businesses to employ security measures that genuinely mitigate the risk of being breached. Security requirements are not just random rules thrown at merchants to annoy them, they come out of hard practical analysis of thousands of actual data breaches that provide valuable information about where things went wrong and which measures could have prevented them.
Periodic vulnerability scans pick up vulnerabilities in a business’s system before cyber criminals can use them. Requirements like PCI ASV scan testing result in identification of vulnerabilities in an organization’s external-facing system every quarter instead of the merchant waiting for someone with malicious intent to exploit the situation.
Access controls ensure fewer people have access to card data and fewer people can do more with that data (making it easier to leak). When fewer people have access, there are fewer leakages for ill-intended actions or simple mistakes that result in loss of data. Encryption ensures that there’s still protection over the data, even though someone managed to gain unauthorized access. Logging and monitoring threats helps organizations pick up breaches before they develop into fully fledged security incidents.
A combination of security requirements work as a layered structure, if one action misses, others will save the day. All these layers genuinely stop people with intent to do harm to a business’s customers from breaching their data.
Limit Legal and Financial Liability
Payment security compliance protects businesses somewhat even when something has gone wrong. If a breach does happen despite all the required security measures being in place, businesses are much better off than those that have ignored the requirements altogether.
Card brands impose much harsher fines on non-compliant merchants whose card data has been breached. Merchants that can prove PCI compliance face significantly less stern penalties and have a stronger negotiating position against the card brands than their non-compliant colleagues. Even insurance companies check compliance when underwriting applications for cyber insurance policies.
From a legal point of view, businesses at least have something to use as a defense point if customers or partners decide to hold them responsible for damages caused by a breach of this nature. Although this doesn’t remove all liability, it’s still much better than having to explain to people why proper security measures were not put in place.
Creating an Achievable Compliance Framework
Payment card security requirements create an achievable framework within which businesses can operate. Without these structured measures, businesses tend to neglect compliance for far too long after the firm has been incorporated and the excitement around compliance dies down.
Quarterly scans, annual assessments, and periodic policy updates keep things interesting enough not to stray too far from compliant firm practices and other required levels of diligence. It forces firms to keep up with security measures instead of allowing their proper implementation fall by the wayside into neglect.
The True Value of Security
Not a single merchant completing compliance documents loves doing it for the sake of compliance. Yet going without proper payment card security just because it might feel annoying or burdensome to comply with is tantamount to making a risky bet against the survival of that same business.
PCI compliance helps mitigate such risks by forcing merchants to adhere to compliance measures. Payment card security requirements help businesses implement proper systems into their organizations without which most firms wouldn’t bother allocating funding or resources.
They stop most breaches from happening before they have a chance to do serious damage to vulnerable companies. Abiding by the rules isn’t burdensome, it’s just what the law requires merchants who want to treat their customers fairly and earn their loyalty for life on the other side of their firm doors.
