The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a compliance standard that specifies security requirements for organizations that process, store, and transmit card data.

This standard was created to strengthen controls over cardholder data and reduce fraud in organizations handling payment cards such as Visa, Mastercard, etc.

Reasons Why Organizations Meet PCI DSS Compliance Requirements

Maintaining regulatory compliance is critical as it helps businesses protect against cybersecurity breaches and data loss. Below are the reasons for meeting PCI DSS compliance requirements:

• Protecting businesses and organizations against cybersecurity risks, threats and data breaches.
• Development of effective and streamlined organizational processes that help achieve compliance.
• Improves a company’s reputation with regulators and customers.
• Avoidance of financial risk from fines due to data breaches or non-compliance with regulatory requirements.

Since PCI DSS certification is required for all organizations that process card data, it is essential to have solutions that help monitor compliance with PCI DSS requirements.

An example of a solution that helps meet PCI DSS compliance requirements is Wazuh.

Wazuh – An open source XDR and SIEM platform

Wazuh is a free, open-source security platform that unifies XDR and SIEM capabilities.

It protects workloads in on-premises, virtualized, containerized, and cloud-based environments.

It helps organizations and individuals protect their data assets against security threats and is widely used by thousands of organizations worldwide, from small to large enterprises.

How Wazuh can help you with PCI DSS Compliance

The PCI DSS standard includes requirements to monitor systems and networks to detect vulnerabilities, malware, and configuration issues, as well as to protect cardholder data from compromise. Wazuh helps implement PCI DSS compliance by performing log analysis, file integrity verification, configuration assessment, intrusion detection, real-time alerts, and automated threat response.

In the Wazuh PCI DSS module, Wazuh gives you options to gain visibility into events happening on your endpoint and helps you track and maintain PCI DSS compliance. Some of these options are:

• Threat detection and automated response.
• Visualization of PCI DSS compliance.
• The classification of alerts according to PCI DSS requirements has not been respected.
• Detailed alert information.
• PCI DSS compliance documentation.
• Report PCI DSS compliance levels.

Threat detection and automated response

Wazuh performs threat detection by analyzing endpoint logs to determine abnormal behavior. Log data is collected by the Wazuh agent on endpoints and forwarded to the Wazuh server, where the data is analyzed using application-specific rules. Then, when Wazuh matches a rule, it generates an alert.

Users can respond to detected threats by configuring the Wazuh active response module. Active responses are countermeasures configured to run when a rule of a specific ID, level, or group triggers an alert. Use cases for Wazuh’s active response feature include removing malware, blocking IP addresses, and quarantining devices, among others.

Users can use Wazuh’s Threat Detection feature to detect threats that may compromise the security of devices, thereby affecting their compliance status. Additionally, users can use the automated response feature to eliminate threats that invalidate device compliance and/or quarantine the device until remediation is complete.

Viewing PCI DSS Compliance

Wazuh has dedicated dashboards to monitor compliance issues. Dashboards provide a quick view of compliance violations, timeline of PCI DSS alerts generated, top requirements violated, Wazuh agents the alerts occur on, and top alert-generating agents.

Classification of alerts according to PCI DSS requirements has not been respected

The Wazuh PCI DSS module offers a “Controls” dashboard where you can see the applicable PCI DSS requirements and their child requirements. This dashboard also displays the alerts generated for each requirement.

The alerts may have been generated due to SCA verification failure, vulnerability detection, or file integrity monitoring scans.

This dashboard is useful in targeted investigations and resolutions. For example, if auditors have flagged a monitored endpoint as non-compliant, you can easily track unmet requirements from the dashboard and resolve issues raised on the endpoint.

PCI DSS compliance documentation

Documentation helps determine the purpose of a compliance requirement, the impact of violating the requirement, and the means to remain in compliance. This helps individuals and organizations create and refine policies to stay secure and compliant.

The Wazuh PCI DSS module has an information section for each requirement. This section details the purpose of the requirement, its description, and the events on the endpoints related to the requirement.

It helps users determine the actual details of the violated requirement, which saves time and improves compliance activities.

Detailed alert information

Users can view events containing the PCI DSS tag in chronological order from the Wazuh dashboard. This helps determine the order in which events occur and their possible impact on the compliance status of the organization.

Report PCI DSS compliance levels

PCI DSS requirements include writing a report of compliance (ROC). Wazuh can generate reports to provide information on endpoint PCI DSS compliance levels. This feature is available on the PCI DSS module dashboard.

The generated report provides details about the detected requirement violations, the monitored endpoint on which they occurred, and the rules that triggered the alert, among other information. This report helps provide a baseline to use in completing the required ROC.

Conclusion

PCI DSS is a requirement for any organization handling cardholder data. Wazuh provides an easy way to gain insight into the compliance status of endpoints in an environment and the resources needed to meet and maintain PCI DSS compliance requirements.

Also, Wazuh has a great open source community of users offering product support and advice.

To start exploring Wazuh, you can use the Quick Start Guide to quickly deploy Wazuh or use the on-demand service Cloud Wazuh a service.

Sponsored and written by Wazuh