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?
The leading security rating service
Since its founding in 2011, Bitsight has become the most widely adopted security ratings platform in the world. Bitsight’s 3,000 customers comprise many of the world’s largest organizations, including 20% of the world’s countries, 25% of the Fortune 500 companies, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and all 4 of the Big 4 accounting firms.
Unprecedented visibility
Bitsight’s industry-leading proprietary data set provides insight into 23 risk vectors – twice as many as other security ratings organizations.
An engaged community
Bitsight has the most robust community of cyber risk professionals interacting on its platform, providing the necessary context for Bitsight customers to gain confidence in their interactions with third-party vendors.
Prioritization & context
Bitsight calculates importance of security data in a more diversified way to ensure the most critical assets are ranked appropriately. Bitsight also gives customers an easy, visual way to prioritize and collaborate internally and with third parties to address the largest areas of risk.