Whois & Analysis for pcisecuritystandards.org

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a proprietary information security standard for organizations that handle branded credit cards from the major card schemes including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and JCB.

The PCI Standard is mandated by the card brands and administered by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council.

The standard was created to increase controls around cardholder data to reduce credit card fraud.

Validation of compliance is performed annually, either by an external Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) or by a firm specific Internal Security Assessor (ISA) that creates a Report on Compliance (ROC) for organizations handling large volumes of transactions, or by Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) for companies handling smaller volumes.

The payment card industry (PCI) denotes the debit, credit, prepaid, e-purse, ATM, and POS cards and associated businesses.

A credit card is a payment card issued to users (cardholders) to enable the cardholder to pay a merchant for goods and services, based on the cardholder's promise to the card issuer to pay them for the amounts so paid plus other agreed charges.

The card issuer (usually a bank) creates a revolving account and grants a line of credit to the cardholder, from which the cardholder can borrow money for payment to a merchant or as a cash advance.

network security means protecting data, such as a database, from destructive forces and from the unwanted actions of unauthorized users.

Computer software, or simply software, is that part of a computer system that consists of data or computer instructions, in contrast to the physical hardware from which the system is built.

In computer science and software engineering, computer software is all information processed by computer systems, programs and data.

Computer software includes computer programs, libraries and related non-executable data, such as online documentation or digital media.

Computer hardware and software require each other and neither can be realistically used on its own.