Category: Continuous Compliance

Of the roughly 400 separate requirements in the PCI DSS, 46% of them require the review or examination of some form of documentation. From policy, to procedure, to configuration standard to diagram, a very significant chunk of achieving PCI compliance starts with paperwork.

How is it then that in the 10 years I’ve been performing PCI and PCI-esque assessments the ‘paperwork’ is almost invariably the last thing to close? I’ve seen large organisations get centralised logging in place before they managed to get their policies and procedures in order.

In Want REAL Information Security? Start With Your Policies I have already gone into why organisations should take polices and procedures more seriously, so I’m not going to repeat myself. But I will just say now that if you didn’t start your project to formalise your policies and procedures at the beginning of your assessment, stop, go back, and start there. A good QSA will fail you for crap policies just as quickly as they would for lack of encryption on stored card holder data.

All too often the client response to a request for documentation is to provide a handful of polices taken from the internet with the company name changed, but no effort whatsoever to customise the content in line with reality. Procedures are virtually non-existent, everything is in unprotected Word docs, several years old, and in no way standardised. The look on the faces of those being asked to provide just the location of the official copies is usually one of confusion, or worse, blank incomprehension.

The worst thing you can do is hand your QSA a bunch of crappy docs and say “You tell me what’s missing.” It does not work that way, and all you’ve done is thoroughly irritate someone who should be on your side. It is YOUR job as the client to tell the QSA which documents and specific language YOU think meets the intent of the DSS requirement testing procedures. The best way to do this (if you don’t have access to a GRC tool with DMS built-in, see below) is just to start with the DSS on a spreadsheet and map your existing documents to it. Your QSA will tell you the gaps, which gives you the necessary action items to begin your remediation.

Here’s the one I give my clients, help yourself; PCI DSS v3.0 – Document Mapping Matrix

Other stuff:

  • Policy Content – In terms of policies, procedures and standards, these are the major headings I generally expect to see; PCI DSS v3.0 – Policy & Procedure Checklist.
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  • Document Management System (DMS) – This does not have to be a major expense, a folder on an intranet share will suffice, but the point is to have a centralised location to place all of your latest approved documents. They should however have access control mechanisms in place to ensure only those with a real need to see them, can. Some of the more elaborate DMSs will take care of version control, ownership, review cycles and so on, as well as automated mappings to regulatory compliance regimes like PCI. Choose what’s right for your business, and look at the Governance Risk & Compliance tools that may have this built-in.
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  • Pre-Packaged Templates – There are many organisations that can offer pre-packaged policy templates, but none that can provide pre-packaged procedures. Best practice policies are numerous and can be customised to suit your business, but procedures are written by your organisation and are necessarily specific to it. Don’t buy anything claiming policies AND procedures out of the box, and don’t buy anything specific to PCI. Cover your business, and if you have to spend money to get your ‘paperwork’ together, focus more on expert guidance. Avoid policies that match the next two points.
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  • Monolithic vs. Modular – It is generally best to have each of your separate policies as stand alone documents with their own version history and ownership, a single policy document is very hard to maintain.
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  • PCI Relevance – The phrase ‘card holder data’ should appear only once, maybe twice, in all of your policies; in the Data Classification Policy. Every other policy refers to the classification in which card holder data was contained (e.g. Highly Confidential).

Like everything in security, getting policies right is not easy, but it is simple. There are many people out there who can help you if you don’t know where to start, and this is not something you should do half-arsed.

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Assuming you’ve performed the Risk Assessment correctly, you will already have the majority of the PCI assessment pre-requisites in place, or at least mostly in place. Now it’s time to get them optimised, and formalised.

The 5 pre-requisites are:

Management Buy-In – If you have not already got this, go back and get it, or if you ARE the management, start taking this more seriously. There is nothing more futile than trying to achieve compliance when it’s clear that management couldn’t care less. Even the appearance of caring is enough to galvanise all levels of an organisation to get the job done, thereby saving enormous amounts of resource and capital costs. The Risk Assessment should have all the ammunition you need to show senior leadership the benefits of an optimised security posture as it puts the loss of data asset Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA) into terms they can understand; money.

See Top 10 Roadblocks to PCI Compliance and  How Information Security & Governance Enable Innovation for a little context on management buy-in and CIA respectively.

Asset Inventory / Register / Database – Does not matter what you call it, it’s a list of all of your assets with enough data points to make the list relevant. For some reason the DSS did not make this a requirement until v3.0, but I cannot even begin to fathom how anyone ever achieved compliance without one. EVERYTHING you do in security has asset management at its core, and there is no appropriate security without asset management done well. The register will include all physical devices and applications (CoTS, custom and DB) but should also include overarching business processes and even people’s special knowledge or necessary skill-sets.

At a minimum, the asset register should record the following; Unique ID #, Friendly Name, Hostname, IP Address, Function, Make, Model, Location, Owner. Of course, you should go MUCH further than this and add things like compliance relevance(s), system dependencies, running service baselines and so on.

Network Diagram – There are a thousand ways to do this, but really only one way to do it well. You start with your asset register, some network scans, and Visio (or equivalent). As long as all of your assets are represented (does not have to be individually), and every sub-net / VLAN reflected, the rest is just in the detail.  Complex is not sustainable, so if your diagrams are monstrous or very difficult to subdivide, then there is a good chance your infrastructure should be reviewed. However:

  • Layer 1 – IP, VLAN, ethernet port addresses and so on. Network admins use this for troubleshooting and it must be sustained at this level. QSA will use this for rule set reviews.
  • Layer 2 – All detail is taken away leaving only the ‘Friendly Names’ from the asset register.
  • Layer 3 – Business process flows (as many as it takes)

Data Flow Diagram + Detailed Narrative – You cannot have effective change control or business transformation processes unless you can determine change impact on all system dependencies. These flows are an asset in and of themselves and should be treated accordingly (i.e. with ownership, and regular reviews for accuracy).  Something as simple as numbered arrows from systems-to-system will suffice. For PCI, these data flow diagrams must be identical in format to the network diagram, hens the layering in Visio.

The data flow narratives are a ‘painfully detailed’ explanation of what happens to the data at every touchpoint. For PCI this will include storage (location / time), storage of what (data elements), truncation, encryption (type and strength) and so on. This is not a summary, this is everything.

Key Stakeholder Matrix – I have performed  2 month consulting gigs at large organisations where the first 6 weeks was spent finding the right people to talk to. Job knowledge and responsibilities are just as much an asset as the systems they maintain. Incident response and disaster recovery are not possible without application of the right knowledge, to the right place, at the right time, so knowing who knows what SHOULD be mandatory.

Eventually I will provide some samples, but for now, these descriptions should make sense. If not, ask your QSA / consultant, and if THEY don’t know, you should replace them.

These 5 things are not PCI requirements, these are SECURITY requirements. Done properly, everything you need for PCI falls out the back-end.

In this, my first installment of the PCI DSS ‘Going Beyond the Standard Series‘, I will begin where not only every PCI assessment should start, but where the development of every security program should start; the Risk Assessment.

Just because you take branded cards, or in any way transmit process or store cardholder data, does NOT mean you should drop what you are doing and dedicate an enormous chunk of your IT capital or manpower resources into achieving compliance. Unless a) there is a distinct business benefit for doing so, and/or b) you are actually increasing the security posture of your entire business.

PCI is not about compliance, it’s about not losing cardholder data.

Compliance with the PCI DSS does not equal security, and security out of context has no business benefit. Either start your PCI program with an eye to staying in business responsibly or don’t bother.

Also, there is a very good chance that taking card payments is not core to your business. If you’re a retailer, your core business function is to sell things, taking payment is just a means to that end. Payment acceptance channels in your business should therefore be simple, inexpensive, and secure. If you can do this well yourself, great, if not, why take the risk? And can you truly innovate away from credit cards if you have to do all the work yourselves?

Should you decide that your existing payment channels are fit for purpose, the second question to ask that is how much should you be spending to fix / mitigate / transfer / remove any problems. i.e. a Business Impact Analysis. You would not spend £100,000 to protect £1,000 worth of data, but you likely would the other way around. Do you know what that balance is for your organisation? From my experience, the answer is generally no, and countless hours and capital are/is lost chasing a goal that was never properly defined.

That said, in terms of PCI, if you were doing security properly, you would already BE PCI compliant (mostly anyway), so it makes sense to just focus on security first and achieve compliance in your own time. As long as you have a reasonable project plan to show your acquirer, report your progress on time, and actually work towards your plan, you will pretty much get as much time as you need to get there. It’s the organisations that couldn’t care less, or are egregiously lax in protecting cardholder data that get the negative attention, and possibly the fines.

Sadly, along with Policies, Standards & Procedures, the Risk Assessment is often one of the last requirements to close during a PCI assessment, when, if they were in place at the beginning, the cost AND level of effort to sustain compliance would have been cut in half.

However, the issue is that most organisations do not have internal resources qualified to perform, or dedicated to, this task. It’s far too specialised, and has never been seen as a true value-add to the business. And unfortunately, the resources available to you in the QSA consulting arena are on the whole inadequate to the task of doing anything other than a PCI ‘audit’. So unless you know security, you would probably not even know the right questions to ask.

I probably should have made choosing the right QSA / consultant for your business the first of this series, but I have basically covered that in previous articles / white papers;

  1. How to Sell Security: While designed primarily to help salespeople in the information security arena, it doubles as a paper for anyone looking to BUY security services;
  2. Selecting The Right QSA For Your Business: This could just as easily be called ‘Questions For Your QSA Request For Proposal (RFP)’ as getting the help of a real security consultant and not ‘just a QSA‘ is critical;
  3. It Takes a Consultant to Hire a Consultant: One of the most difficult aspects of choosing the right help for your organisation, which begins with asking the right questions.

Bottom line; If you haven’t performed a Risk Assessment, go back and do it, and if you cannot do this yourself, find someone who can.

If you don’t know the right questions to ask, ask someone who does.

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In a previous blog How to Achieve Compliance on the Road to Real Security I stated my intention to write a series of articles on; “…the intent of the 12 main sections of the PCI DSS, as well as provide guidance and options on how to go above and beyond PCI…”  Well, here it is …finally.

For this series, I will provide 3 distinct elements for each aspect of the PCI assessment process, the LAST 12 of which will be the PCI DSS v3.0 requirements sections themselves. I do this because you should not even be LOOKING at these until you have completed several pre-requisites.

The first is performing a Risk Assessment, the second is choosing the right QSA / consultant to help you.

Element 1 – Intent: One of the most confusing things about the DSS – to both layman and crappy QSAs alike – is how can a controls standard that is the most prescriptive of any regulation to date, be open to so much interpretation? How can QSAs have different opinions, or worse, how can QSAs working for same QSA company have different opinions?

Well, you just have to look at how many times the word ‘periodic‘ appears in the DSS to begin to figure this one out; 11 times against 5 distinct requirement sections (3, 5, 8, 9 & 10). Or how about ‘appropriate‘?; 15 times, also in 5 distinct requirement sections (2, 4, 6, 9 & 12). Or ‘applicable‘?; 15 times in 6 distinct requirement sections (2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 11 & 12).

But the prize for ambiguity goes to 2.2.1.a.; “Select a sample of system components and inspect the system configurations to verify that only one primary function is implemented per server.”  The SCC does – in v3.0 anyway – provide guidance that this means you should not have functions at different ‘security levels’ on the same server, but ‘security levels’ as defined by whom?

For a number of years the SSC has been trying desperately to bring the standard into line with a more risk based approach. For example, in the requirements section, the word ‘risk’ appears 20 times in v3.0, compared to v1.2 in which it appeared only 5 times; Patching requirements have gone from ‘you will do it in 30 days’, to ‘do it in 30 days IF it’s appropriate’; and so on…

It all boils down to the INTENT of each section, and too often, the standard is seen as a black and white / all-or-nothing checklist with no room to actually fit the security goals into the business as a whole. This is not the case, so an understanding of the intent is critical before making ANY move to become compliant.

Element 2 – Above & Beyond: The second thing I will attempt to do is explain that every requirement is a bare minimum, so going just a little bit above and beyond is not only the RIGHT thing to do, it builds a portfolio of compensating controls that, if applied in total, should enable you and your QSA to have conversations related to risk and not semantics.

Element 3 – Continuous Compliance Validation: The third thing I will do is try to provide some guidance on how to KEEP the controls in place through either automation or process change. Unless your goal is to develop your management systems into those that can provide Continuous Compliance Validation, you’re working much harder than you have to, and your incident response capability will never be optimal.

In the end, this series will NOT be about PCI compliance, it will be about doing security properly and appropriately for your business, compliance will be nothing more than a by-product.

And finally, this is not about credit card data, this is about protecting ALL your information assets. Credit cards are approaching their end-of-life, and with the card brand’s acceptance of Host Card Emulation (HCE) and the enormous pressure to migrate payments to mobile devices, this will happen at an ever increasing pace. Don’t waste your time and effort on ‘just PCI’.

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Just about everyone who writes on information security has had ample blodder from the Target / Neiman Marcus et al breaches, myself included. Some blame the PCI standards or the card brands themselves, some blame the retailers for not doing enough, and those that are a little more charitable, just blame the thieves.

In the end, it’s not about blame, it’s about learning the lesson, making the necessary adjustments, and moving on responsibly. Unfortunately, this will NOT include being able to move on from credit cards or from the PCI DSS v3.0 any time soon, so organisations wanting to avoid becoming the next Target (excuse the pun), had better pay more attention to their enterprise-wide security program, not just their annual compliance ‘projects’.

Just as importantly, they need to pay VERY close attention to innovation in the payment / authentication space, and advances in more real-time security measures / technologies.

Nothing in the PCI DSS is anything other than a bare minimum, and represents enough security for the card brands to say they are doing what they can. But any organisation who thinks this is enough will eventually lose data, and I for one have no sympathy.

You can look at every single requirement and come up with two choices: 1) Good enough for PCI, and 2) Appropriate for the business. 9 times out of 10, the second option is more difficult to implement, but in almost every instance, it is both easier to maintain, and more secure.

For example;

PCI DSS Requirements 1.X are all about networking, firewalls, segmentation and the like, and while it does stress that every service/protocol/port must have a business justification, it does not state specifically that every individual in-scope device must have least-privilege inbound and outbound rules applied.

  1. 1.1.6.a – Verify that firewall and router configuration standards include a documented list of all services, protocols and ports, including business justification for each
  2. 1.2.1.a – Examine firewall and router configuration standards to verify that they identify inbound and outbound traffic necessary for the cardholder data environment.
  3. 1.2.1.b – Examine firewall and router configurations to verify that inbound and outbound traffic is limited to that which is necessary for the cardholder data environment.

Yes, we can imply it means each device (especially 1.2.1.b), and yes, it’s the right thing to do, but no QSA can enforce anything that is not specifically written within the standard. If they had just replaced “the cardholder data environment” with “each in-scope system” DSS Section 1 would be VERY different, and instil a significantly better security posture.

However, if they DID change it to least privilege for every device, is it actually possible to implement and maintain it? Same goes for more robust configuration standards (DSS Section 2), or real-time logging (DSS Section 10), what should be done is very different from what the DSS requires.

In answer to the question, yes, it is possible, and it all boils down to one thing; baselines

Security is not about crunching big data to determine patterns, that’s only truly relevant in forensics when it’s already too late. Real security is knowing exactly what something SHOULD look like performing normally, and reporting everything outside of that. Keep it simple, or it cannot be monitored, maintained, or measured, but the PCI DSS can never go this far.

Hypothetical: If you knew every running service, listening port, and permitted connections each in-scope device should maintain to perform its function, then anything NOT those things should be investigated. That’s a baseline. Security would dictate that you have alerts based on these anomalies for all systems, not a sample of them and certainly not once a year (point-in-time).

How difficult would it be to automate this process so that EVERY system (not just PCI ones) reports back on a daily/weekly/monthly – or ANY period of time less tun a year! – basis to a centralised management console to perform the baseline comparisons? Then what’s to stop you comparing the device’s listening ports to firewall rule sets to make sure they are properly defined? Or comparing them against enterprise policies and standards, or known business data flows?

Not one organisation or security vendor is doing this properly, at least not that I have seen, or not yet. Some vendors do bits of this, but the last thing you want to do is patch together a bunch of separate, non-integrated systems, as the effort to do so will usually outweigh the risk mitigation, or the cost-to-benefit ratio.

However, none of this can happen until you have centralised and accurate asset management, and seeing as the PCI DSS just added that as a requirement in v3.0, most organisations have a long way to go before they can ever achieve this ultimate in security; continuous compliance validation.