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Data Protection

PCI DSS Compliance: Vital for Financial Institutions

Any company that processes, stores, and transmits credit card data must be PCI DSS compliant. This compliance is important because it helps ensure that your customers’ data is safe and secure.

It is worth noting that credit card data breaches are becoming increasingly common these days. By complying with PCI DSS, financial institutions can reduce risk and prevent their customers’ data and their business from being compromised.

Read on to learn how important PCI DSS compliance is for financial institutions.

Why financial institutions must comply

Requirements defined by PCI DSS are implemented primarily to protect the privacy of credit card data holders and to ensure that their data is kept safe from theft or fraud.

Companies that fail to comply are subject to fines and the loss of the right to process credit card payments. As such, it is important that companies understand what these requirements are.

Some of the key PCI DSS requirements include the use of firewalls and anti-virus software, protection of sensitive data, and regular testing of security measures.

The Benefits of PCI DSS Compliance for Financial Institutions

In fact, financial institutions that handle credit and debit card transactions are required to comply with the PCI DSS. While compliance can be expensive and time consuming, there are several benefits that make it worth the effort.

First, as stated at the very beginning of the article, PCI DSS compliance helps protect against data breaches.

By ensuring that credit card data is properly protected, companies can reduce the risk of a costly breach.

Second, compliance can help companies build trust with their customers. Customers are increasingly concerned about the security of their personal information, and a company that is PCI DSS compliant can show that it takes credit card data security seriously.

Finally, companies avoid fines and other penalties. Lack of compliance results in fines from credit card companies or other regulators.

In addition, they may also lose the ability to process credit card transactions, which can have a significant impact on their bottom line.

 

 

When it comes to PCI DSS compliance, financial institutions face several challenges

As new ways of stealing credit card information are developed, financial institutions must be quick to adapt their security measures.

In addition, PCI DSS requires financial institutions to keep detailed records of their compliance efforts.

Compliance can be a challenge, especially for smaller institutions. One of the biggest challenges is to keep up with the ever-changing threat landscape.

First, financial institutions must ensure that all data is encrypted, both in transit and at rest. They also need to have robust security measures in place to protect against external threats, such as cybercriminals.

In addition, companies must have a process for dealing with compromised customer data.

Finally, they must keep up with the ever-changing PCI DSS landscape, which can be difficult due to the other demands on time and resources.

This can be a lengthy and expensive process, especially for institutions that do not have the resources of larger banks.

payShield 10K: You can secure your digital payments with confidence

The payShield 10K, the fifth generation of payment HSMs from Thales, Eval’s partner company, offers a suite of proven security features in critical environments, including transaction processing, protection of sensitive data, payment credential issuance, mobile card acceptance, and tokenization.

The payShield 10K solution can be used throughout the global payments ecosystem by issuers, service providers, acquirers, processors, and payment networks, offering a number of benefits:

  • Simplifies deployment in data centers;
  • It offers high resiliency and availability;
  • It offers the broadest card and mobile application support in a timely manner;
  • Supports performance upgrades without hardware change;
  • Maintains compatibility with all Thales payment HSMs.

You can secure digital payments with confidence

Playing a key security role for remote digital and face-to-face payments, the payShield 10K solution provides the necessary trust that underpins communications between those involved in payment processes.

payShield 10K meets the latest mandatory security requirements and best practices for a wide variety of organizations, including PCI DSS, ANSI, LGPD, and various global and regional payment brands and networks.

  • Simplify Deployment

Payment HSMs can be securely configured, managed, and monitored remotely from convenience locations to reduce your costs and simplify your ongoing operations;

  • Maximize Resilience

Equipped with two power supplies and hot-swappable fans, Thales HSMs significantly increase mean time between failures (MTBF) and simplify field maintenance;

  • Take advantage of proven integrations

Thales’ payment HSMs are the most widely deployed in the world and supported by the largest number of payment application providers.

As an institution that handles credit card information, it is important to be PCI DSS certified

This certification proves that you are taking the necessary precautions to protect your customers’ data from being compromised.

By achieving PCI DSS certification, you can be sure that your company meets the highest security standards in the industry.

About Eval

With a track record of leadership and innovation dating back to 2004, Eval not only keeps up with technological trends, but we are also in an incessant quest to bring news by offering solutions and services that make a difference to people’s lives.

With value recognized by the market, EVAL’s solutions and services meet the highest regulatory standards of public and private organizations, such as SBIS, ITI, PCI DSS, and LGPD. In practice, we promote information security and compliance, increase companies’ operational efficiency, and reduce costs.

Innovate now, lead always: get to know Eval’s solutions and services and take your company to the next level.

Eval, safety is value.

Categories
Data Protection

Anti-Ransomware: Only 48% of Enterprises are Ready

A new survey from Thales, one of the world’s leading advanced technology and Eval partner, reveals that malware, ransomware, and phishing continue to plague companies globally when it comes to data protection and privacy. And that few have an anti-Ransomware plan.

One in five businesses (21%) suffered a ransomware attack last year, with 43% of them experiencing a significant impact on operations. The severity, frequency and impact of ransomware attacks have an impact on the life cycle of organizations.

O
2022 Thales Data Threat Report
conducted by 451 Research, including more than 2,700 IT decision-makers worldwide, found that less than half of respondents (48%) have implemented an anti-Ransomware plan.

In addition, a fifth (22%) of organizations admitted that they have paid or would pay a ransom for their data.

Even against this backdrop, 41% of respondents said they had no plans to change security spending, even with greater ransomware impacts.

Healthcare was the most prepared at 57% with an anti-Ransomware plan, and energy was the least at 44%, despite both sectors experiencing significant breaches in the last twelve months.

Anti-Ransomware Plans: The Cloud Has Increased Complexity and Risk of Attack

The accelerated move to the cloud is also causing more complexity and risk. According to the report, 34% of organizations are using more than 50 SaaS applications.

However, 51% of respondents said it was more complex to manage privacy and data protection requirements, such as LGPD (General Data Protection Act), in a cloud environment than on-premises networks, up from 46% last year.

Only 22% of respondents said they have more than 60% of their sensitive data encrypted in the cloud.

Threats and compliance challenges from ransomware attacks

Throughout 2021, security incidents remained high, with nearly one-third (29%) of companies experiencing a breach in the past 12 months. In addition, almost half (43%) of IT leaders admitted to having failed a compliance audit.

Globally, IT leaders ranked malware (56%), ransomware (53%), and phishing (40%) as the top source of security attacks.

Managing these risks is an ongoing challenge, with nearly half (45%) of IT leaders reporting an increase in the volume, severity, and/or scope of cyber attacks in the past 12 months. This makes anti-Ransomware initiatives more difficult.

Ransomware: Paying the High Price for the Attack

Cybersecurity Ventures expects global cybercrime costs to grow 15% annually over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion per year by 2025, up from $3 trillion in 2015.

This represents the largest economic wealth transfer in history, risks the incentives for innovation and investment.

The risk is exponentially greater than the damage caused by natural disasters in a year, and will be more profitable than the global trade in all the major illegal drugs combined.

The damage cost estimate is based on historical cybercrime figures, including recent year-over-year growth.

This means a dramatic increase in the activities of organized crime gangs and hostile nation-state sponsored cybercriminals and a cyber attack surface that will be an order of magnitude larger in 2025 than it is today.

The costs of cybercrime include:

  • Damage and data destruction;
  • Stolen money;
  • Loss of productivity;
  • Theft of intellectual property;
  • Theft of personal and financial information;
  • Peculato;
  • Miscellaneous fraud;
  • Post attack interruption;
  • Forensic investigation;
  • Restore and delete hacked data;
  • Reputational damage.

Anti-Ransomware and malware defense should be deep and cover separate approaches, including antivirus, phishing recognition, and data encryption.

In practice, the best protection against these attacks is preparedness, frequent cyber security crisis simulation exercises, and a strong awareness campaign for your users.

This is when investment in anti-ransomware solutions makes the difference

 

CipherTrust Data Security Platform implements the right anti-ransomware strategy

According to IDC, more than 175 zetabytes of data will be created by 2025, and today more than half of all corporate data is stored in the cloud.

To handle the complexity of where data is stored, CipherTrust Data Security Platform provides strong capabilities to protect and control access to sensitive data in databases, files, and containers. Specific technologies include:

CipherTrust Transparent Encryption

Encrypt data in on-premises, cloud, database, file, and Big Data environments with comprehensive access controls and detailed data access audit logging that can prevent the most malicious attacks.

CipherTrust Database Protection

It provides transparent column-level encryption of structured and confidential data that resides in databases such as credit card, social security numbers, national identification numbers, passwords, and e-mail addresses.

CipherTrust Application Data Protection

It offers APIs for developers to quickly add encryption and other cryptographic functions to their applications, while SecOps controls the encryption keys.

CipherTrust Tokenization

It offers application-level data tokenization services in two convenient solutions that provide customer flexibility – Token without Vault with dynamic policy-based data masking and Tokenization in Vault.

CipherTrust Batch Data Transformation

Provides static data masking services to remove sensitive information from production databases so that compliance and security issues are alleviated when sharing a database with a third party for analysis, testing, or other processing. Critical for companies looking for anti-Ransomware strategies.

CipherTrust Manager

It centralizes keys, management policies, and data access for all CipherTrust Data Security Platform products and is available in FIPS 140-2 Level 3 compliant physical and virtual formats.

CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager

It offers its own key lifecycle management (BYOK) for many cloud infrastructure, platform, and software-as-a-service providers.

CipherTrust KMIP Server

It centralizes key management for the Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) commonly used in storage solutions.

CipherTrust TDE Key Manager

Centralizes key management for encryption found in Oracle, SQL and Always Encrypted SQL.

Regarding anti-Ransomware initiatives, the portfolio of data protection products that make up the CipherTrust Data Security Platform solution enables companies to protect data at rest and in motion across the entire IT ecosystem and ensures that the keys to this information are always protected and only under your control.

It simplifies data security, improves operational efficiency, and accelerates compliance time. Regardless of where your data resides.

The CipherTrust platform ensures that your data is secure, with a wide range of proven, industry-leading products and solutions for deployment in data centers, either those managed by cloud service providers (CSPs) or managed service providers (MSPs), or as a cloud-based service managed by Thales, a leading security company.

Portfolio of tools that ensures protection against cybercriminals

With data protection products from the CipherTrust Data Security Platform, your company can regarding anti-Ransomware investments:

Strengthen security and compliance

CipherTrust data protection products and solutions address the demands of a range of security and privacy requirements, including electronic identification, authentication and trust, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), General Data Protection Act (LGPD), and other compliance requirements.

Optimizes staff and resource efficiency in data protection and privacy

CipherTrust Data Security Platform offers the broadest support for data security use cases in the industry, with products designed to work together, a single line for global support, a proven track record of protecting against evolving threats, and the industry’s largest ecosystem of data security partnerships.

With a focus on ease of use, APIs for automation, and responsive management, the CipherTrust Data Security Platform solution ensures that your teams can quickly deploy, secure, and monitor the protection of your business.

In addition, professional services and partners are available for design, implementation, and training assistance to ensure fast and reliable implementations with minimal staff time.

Reduces total cost of ownership

CipherTrust Data Security Platform’s data protection portfolio offers a broad set of data security products and solutions that can be easily scaled, expanded for new use cases, and have a proven track record of protecting new and traditional technologies.

With CipherTrust Data Security Platform, companies can prepare their investments for the future while reducing operating costs and capital expenditures.

About Eval

With a track record of leadership and innovation dating back to 2004, Eval not only keeps up with technological trends, but we are also in an incessant quest to bring news by offering solutions and services that make a difference to people’s lives.

With market recognized value, Eval’s solutions and services meet the highest regulatory standards for public and private organizations, such as SBIS, ITI, PCI DSS, and LGPD. In practice, we promote information security and compliance, increase companies’ operational efficiency, and reduce costs.

Innovate now, lead always: get to know Eval’s solutions and services and take your company to the next level.

Eval, safety is value.

Categories
Data Protection

Cybersecurity: Healthcare accounts for 24.7% of breaches

As health systems and hospitals were under stress as a result of the current global health crisis, their IT departments also faced critical situations and staff shortages as they battled relentless cyber attacks.

Cyber security breaches hit a historic high in 2021, exposing a record amount of patients’ protected health information,
according to a report by Critical Insights
.

In 2021, 45 million individuals were affected by attacks on healthcare data, up from 34 million in 2020. That number has tripled in just three years to 14 million in 2018, according to the report, which analyzes healthcare data breaches reported to the U.S. department of health and human services by healthcare organizations.

The total number of individuals affected has increased by 32% from 2020, meaning that more records are exposed for data breaches in the healthcare sector each year.

The total number of violations increased by only 2.4%, from 663 in 2020 to 679 in 2021, but still reached historic records.

Whether as a ransomware attack vector, credential collection, or device theft, healthcare is the primary target for attackers to monetize with personal patient information and sell on the Dark Web or hold an entity unable to provide patient care until ransomed.

As we move into 2022, healthcare organizations need to be aware of cybersecurity requirements

According to a study by Tenable, an American cybersecurity company, 1,825 data breach incidents were publicly disclosed between November 2020 and October 2021.

The industries most affected by data breaches in the healthcare sector were (24.7%), education (12.9%), and government (10.8%). In Brazil, the segments that suffered the most from cyber incidents were government (29.8%) and the financial sector (27%), respectively.

Also according to the study done by Critical Insights, data breaches in the healthcare industry, especially against health plans will increase by almost 35% from 2020 to 2021.

And attacks against business partners or third-party vendors increased by almost 18% from 2020 to 2021.

In Brazil, examples such as the Fleury group, the Hospital das Clínicas de São Paulo, the hospitals Sírio-Libanês, do Amor (formerly the Cancer Hospital), Santa Casa de Barretos, and Laboratório Gross have also been victims of cybercriminals against their institutions’ cybersecurity in recent years.

One of the most recent cases occurred in October 2021 with insurer Porto Seguro, which also has a segment related to health plans, the cyber attack caused instability in service channels and in some of its systems. Even non-insurance products, such as credit cards, have experienced instability.

Cyber attacks against providers, where most breaches are historically reported, have declined somewhat after peaking in 2020. Last year, 493 providers reported a data breach, a drop of about 4% from 515 in 2020.

However, it is too early to tell whether this modest improvement represents the beginning of a longer trend in the right direction, according to the report’s authors.

The years 2021/22 offered a ‘perfect storm’ for cybercriminals with ransomware attacks targeting enterprise cybersecurity

In practice, thecybersecurity teams are trying hard and trying to do a good job of reinforcing their defensesWhether internally or through partnerships with managed security providers, the measures are a response to the increase in attacks that occurred in 2020, when cybercriminals increased their efforts to take advantage of vulnerabilities exposed during the first chaotic days of the pandemic.

Cyber security incidents remain the most common cause of breaches with a 10% increase by 2021. Cybercrime was also responsible for the vast majority of individual records affected by breaches, which means that these records were probably sold on the dark web, according to the report.

The data also indicates an increase in cybercriminal incidents in ambulatory/specialty clinics, which saw a 41% increase in these types of breaches in 2021 compared to 2020.

As we move into 2022, healthcare organizations need to be aware not only of their cybersecurity posture, but also of third-party vendors who have access to data and networks. We are seeing more awareness and proactive approaches to cyber security in this industry, but there is still a long way to go.

 

Cyber security in 2022 will be marked by major attacks on the healthcare sector

This is no time for healthcare organizations’ cybersecurity teams to let their guard down. Cybercriminals are aiming at bigger targets. Exploits, especially ransomware, are becoming more sophisticated.

Cybercriminals are expanding their activities to take advantage of security vulnerabilities throughout the healthcare supply chain, from business partners to health plans and outpatient facilities.

To strengthen their defenses, healthcare organizations need to establish a comprehensive risk management program and should classify their business partners by risk level based on the type of data that third parties can access.

Other steps organizations can take include establishing procedures and processes to evaluate third parties before granting access to data, emphasizing protection in any business agreements with third parties, and working with cybersecurity companies for managed intrusion detection and response services.

CipherTrust Data Security Platform is an important resource in combating data breaches in the healthcare industry

According to IDC, more than 175 zetabytes of data will be created by 2025, and today more than half of all corporate data is stored in the cloud.

To handle the complexity of where data is stored, CipherTrust Data Security Platform provides strong capabilities to protect and control access to sensitive data in databases, files, and containers. Specific technologies include:

CipherTrust Transparent Encryption

Encrypts data in on-premises, cloud, database, file, and Big Data environments with comprehensive access controls and detailed data access audit logging that can prevent the most malicious attacks.

CipherTrust Database Protection

It provides transparent column-level encryption of structured and confidential data that resides in databases such as credit card, social security numbers, national identification numbers, passwords, and e-mail addresses.

CipherTrust Application Data Protection

It offers APIs for developers to quickly add encryption and other cryptographic functions to their applications, while SecOps controls the encryption keys.

CipherTrust Tokenization

It offers application-level data tokenization services in two convenient solutions that provide customer flexibility – Token without Vault with dynamic policy-based data masking and Tokenization in Vault.

CipherTrust Batch Data Transformation

Provides static data masking services to remove sensitive information from production databases so that compliance and cybersecurity issues are alleviated when sharing a database with a third party for analysis, testing, or other processing.

CipherTrust Manager

It centralizes keys, management policies, and data access for all CipherTrust Data Security Platform products and is available in FIPS 140-2 Level 3 compliant physical and virtual formats.

CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager

It offers its own key lifecycle management (BYOK) for many cloud infrastructure, platform, and software-as-a-service providers.

CipherTrust KMIP Server

It centralizes key management for the Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) commonly used in storage solutions.

CipherTrust TDE Key Manager

Centralizes key management for encryption found in Oracle, SQL and Always Encrypted

The portfolio of data protection products that make up the CipherTrust Data Security Platform solution enables healthcare organizations to protect data at rest and in motion across the entire IT ecosystem and ensures that the keys to this information are always protected and only under your control.

It simplifies data cybersecurity, improves operational efficiency, and accelerates compliance time. Regardless of where your data resides.

The CipherTrust platform ensures that your data is secure, with a wide range of proven, industry-leading products and solutions for deployment in data centers, either those managed by cloud service providers (CSPs) or managed service providers (MSPs), or as a cloud-based service managed by Thales, a leading cybersecurity company.

Tool portfolio that ensures data and cyber protection

With data protection products from the CipherTrust Data Security Platform, your healthcare organization can:

Strengthen cybersecurity and compliance

CipherTrust data protection products and solutions address the demands of a number of cybersecurity and privacy requirementsincluding electronic identification, authentication, and trust, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), General Data Protection Law (LGPD)among other compliance requirements.

Optimizes efficiency of staff and resources related to cybersecurity

CipherTrust Data Security Platform offers the broadest support for handling personal patient data in data security use cases in the industry, with products designed to work together, a single line for global support, a proven track record of protecting against evolving threats, and the industry’s largest ecosystem of data security partnerships.

With a focus on ease of use, APIs for automation, and responsive management, the CipherTrust Data Security Platform solution ensures that your teams can quickly deploy, secure, and monitor the protection of your business.

In addition, professional services and partners are available for design, implementation, and training assistance to ensure fast and reliable implementations with minimal staff time.

Reduces total cost of ownership

CipherTrust Data Security Platform’s data protection portfolio offers a broad set of data security products and solutions that can be easily scaled, expanded for new use cases, and have a proven track record of protecting new and traditional technologies.

With CipherTrust Data Security Platform, healthcare institutions can prepare their investments for the future while reducing operational costs and capital expenditures.

About Eval

With a track record of leadership and innovation dating back to 2004, Eval not only keeps up with technological trends, but we are also in an incessant quest to bring news by offering solutions and services that make a difference to people’s lives.

With value recognized by the market, EVAL’s solutions and services meet the highest regulatory standards of public and private organizations, such as SBIS, ITI, PCI DSS, and LGPD. In practice, we promote information security and compliance, increase companies’ operational efficiency, and reduce costs.

Innovate now, lead always: get to know Eval’s solutions and services and take your company to the next level.

Eval, safety is value.