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The WiKID Blog

Viewing posts from January, 2009

visa-adds-carrot-to-stick-for-pci-goulash

This will be interesting to look back on in a year: Visa is creating a $20,000,000 bonus pool to incent their members to be PCI compliant. :

Visa's new Visa PCI Compliance Acceleration Program is designed to spur entities that are covered by PCI rules to comply in a speedy fashion, said Jennifer Fischer, a director with Visa USA. "This program is part of our larger strategy for protecting card holder data and to ensure that we are doing everything we can to protect it from compromise," she said.
Why is it needed? Because:
Though nearly 18 months have passed since PCI rules went into full effect, only 36% of Tier 1 merchants and 15% of Tier 2 merchants are currently compliant with the requirements, according to Visa.
I think this might be the more effective bit:
At the same time, acquiring banks that fail to ensure compliance by Sept. 30, 2007 will be assessed fines starting at $5,000 a month for each non-compliant merchant. The fines increase to $25,000 per month for each non-compliant merchant after Dec. 31, 2007. Until now, fines have only been assessed in cases where actual data breaches occurred.
That will get them going!

visibility-and-pci-security

I'm a fan the PCI security standard from Visa, Mastercard and American Express. It is a tight in all the right ways and loose in the right ways. It tells credit card processors and merchants explicity that they must use two-factor authentication for remote access, but nothing more. If PCI has a problem, it is that it will be too little too late to protect card holder data and stave off regulation. The structure of the credit card industry makes it tough for it to be otherwise. Will making retailers liable for credit card breaches help? I'm not sure.

voting-hackable-or-error-prone-you-decide


Hat Tip: MSNBC First Read: The SciFi channel has a page up that displays voting mechanism by state. It's quite jazzy, but I have one problem with the methodology. Mainly that they seem to think that if it's electronic, it's hackable but not error prone. While they do have a page discussing the pros and cons of the voting machines, they don't rank them that way on the map.

we-are-71

According to eSecurity Planet, the WiKID Strong Authentication System is number 71 of the top 75 Open Source Security Apps. Actually, the ranking seems to be random. We are one of two entries under the "User Authentication" section and the sections are listed alphabetically. So, if our category had been "Authentication", we would have been 12th, just after Anti-spyware. :)

why-you-need-two-factor-authentication-for-ssh

I've been chewing on doing a post about the need for two-factor authentication SSH for a while, long enough that someone else has done the work for me, which is just the way I like it.

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