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What is PCI DSS Penetration Testing Services?

PCI DSS penetration testing is compulsory for financial organisations processing card transactions

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) It is a standard created by the payment industry for validating a set of requirements for businesses that deal with credit card information.

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There are requirements that organisations using payment devices must strictly adhere to regularly. These PCI DSS requirements include:

Protection of cardholder's data
Building and maintaining a secure network
Maintaining a vulnerability management program
Maintaining an information security policy
Implementing strong access control measures
Regular monitoring and testing of networks.

What is Managed Network Detection and Response?

The PCI DSS penetration test also includes assessing external and internal network infrastructures and applications.

There are three types of PCI DSS penetration testing:

White-box assessments

The organisation provides application and network details for the penetration testing.

Black-box assessments

The organisation offers no information for the testing.

Grey-box assessments

The organisation provides limited details on the targeted security systems.

Microminder offers penetration testing to all infrastructural and security components, including mobile and web application systems. We also provide cloud security and vulnerability assessments.

Why you need PCI DSS Penetration Testing Services?

It is vital to carry out this penetration test regularly because it offers adequate security analysis of real-world threats.

Networks and systems in organisations are built and maintained by staff who are not cyber security experts; this is why the penetration test is required to simulate an attack and exploit vulnerabilities before an attacker does.

PCI DSS penetration testing exposes the following:

Coding vulnerabilities
Wrong access controls and network configuration
Improper certification and session management
Encryption flaws.

When do you need PCI DSS Penetration Testing Services?

The PCI DSS penetration test frequency depends on the organisation's size and the test's scale.

Penetration testing should be carried out annually for vendors that store and transmit payment card data. The testing can be quarterly for merchants using a third party to store and share payment data on their behalf.

However, some factors affect the test frequency in organisations; these include:

Significant upgrades of network and system infrastructures
Addition of a web server to the environment,
Installation of security updates.

Methodology behind PCI DSS penetration testing

PCI DSS penetration testing involves the proactive security identification system. These steps include:

This second step involves information gathering about the target systems and networks. This discovery step in the PCI DSS penetration testing also recognises all the hosts in the target network. The information gathered will be used to identify potential attack vectors.

This is the first step in the PCI DSS penetration testing. It involves defining the test's scope and identifying the organisation's PCI DSS compliance assessment requirements. Scoping determines the rules and limitations before the actual penetration testing.

This step involves exploiting the vulnerabilities of the systems to gain unauthorised entry. It can be a DoS attack, phishing, buffer overflow and SQL injections.

This is the comprehensive evaluation of the test results. It highlights detailed information about the system's vulnerabilities, potential impacts and suggestions to resolve them.

This entails ensuring all the identified security issues are fixed.

Types of PCI DSS Penetration Testing

There are different forms of PCI DSS penetration testing; these include:

The application penetration test detects vulnerabilities caused by unsafe development or coding practices. It resolves the vulnerabilities and ensures no unauthorised access to sensitive data.

This test detects vulnerabilities around the weak security protocols of wireless technologies. Wireless network penetration testing eliminates these fraudulent access points using stronger passwords and updates the security protocols to global standards.

This test can identify security flaws like misconfigured software, outdated software and operating systems, firewalls and insecure protocols. The software becomes reconfigured, and obsolete software and operating systems are upgraded or replaced.

This test evaluates people and processes and their possibilities of bringing security risks to the organisation. The pentesting seeks to identify employees not adhering to safe security practices using social engineering methods like impersonation and phishing.

This segmentation check tests whether the rules isolating high-security networks from the less secure ones are valid and appropriate. This check protects sensitive data from breaches and malware.

What to consider before PCI DSS penetration testing

While numerous companies offer pentesting services, it is crucial to identify the best options.

It means a diligent search for a tested and trusted penetration testing partner with proven experience in several heavily regulated industries.

Microminder, a crest-accredited, tested and trusted provider of penetration services, offers a wide range of pentesting, which is why you should consider some of these criteria before your subsequent PCI DSS penetration testing.

These criteria include:

Reputation

It is essential to research past projects, past and current clients, and reviews before choosing your next penetration testing partner.

Remediation

It is essential to engage a company like Microminder, as we pride ourselves on being one of the best in the industry in proactively identifying security gaps and remediating them.

Service Legal Agreement (SLA)

It is vital to have a comprehensive agreement that takes care of the testing methodologies, deliverables, and limitations of penetration testing.

We bring intelligence and mindset together.

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Client Testimonials

What our clients say about us

Clients in over 20 countries have secured their businesses from online threats with our cybersecurity services. Excellent customer support and cost-effective pricing are just a few of the reasons we’ve established long-lasting, highly successful relationships with our varied clients. Read our company testimonials to learn more about our unique capabilities and why so many clients have chosen us as their go-to provider for security solutions.

Claire Lee

Practice Manager - Amsel and Wilkins LLP

Microminder's in depth and broad scope pen testing truly provided us with some valuable insights that uncovered key business risks and highlighted necessary actionable intelligent changes that needed to be implemented within our business to combat any potential cyber-attacks from adversaries and prevent any breaches. This exercise helped us to enhance our cyber security posture and test our system’s resilience. We are quite pleased with our engagement with Microminder.

Julie Cockbill

Head of Operations - InfinityBlu dental

Microminder's 24/7 managed security services got deployed with such ease and immediately gave us an eagle eye view into our security logs and events, highlighting any indicators of compromise, effectively automated our response and correlated the incidents with full context, thereby triaging and eliminating all false positives. Our team are amazed at the speed and accuracy of Microminder’s Open XDR technology and skilled staff.

Tina Patel

Head of Integrations – Dental Beauty Partners

Our priority is business continuity and security, especially considering our operations across our 30+ practices. Microminder helped us with a tailored managed security services that aligned with our business needs. Their technology is at the forefront of the industry and that allows us to fully put our trust in their cyber security experts. We are glad to have Microminder as an extension of our technology team!

Philipp Mussbacher

Security Engineer & solutions consultant – Anonymous

Due to the fact that we work a lot with sensitive data in a business context, information security plays a big role for us. Due to the difficult labour market situation and the urgency to improve our security, we have chosen Microminder's CISO as a Service model and are very happy with it. Our virtual CISO manages to ensure stability and quality on the security side as well as legal requirements and compliance. I can only recommend Microminder's service.

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