Overhaul of online security for payment card industry

Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - 13:48 by Simon Crisp

If you make regular payments via your credit or debit card while enjoying online shopping, then you will be pleased to hear that new regulations handed out by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCISSC), will make it much safer to shop online.

The updated regulations come as part of the second revision to the PCI's Data Security Standard. Spokesperson Bob Russo explained that while these improvements are relatively small in scale, they will definitely have an impact on the average consumer's ability to be assured of experiencing safe shopping online.

Mr Russo told V3.co.uk that the PCISSC had held consultations with a wide range of retailers and organisations which accept card payments, in order to help form the future security standards for the industry.

The most significant changes are being made to the way in which payments are transferred and handled by retailers who seek to make sales to customers located in different nations. Mr Russo says that it should now be easier for European countries to do business with one another, especially since borders and boundaries are regularly traversed in the name of e-commerce.

Around 50 per cent of the information used to formulate the new PCI DSS was generated internationally, with the rest collated in the US, creating a global picture of how e-commerce operates and where ameliorations can be made to previous payment card security policies.

While the largest e-commerce firms are obviously important in relation to any payment card regulations, the PCISSC wanted to make sure that those small and medium sized businesses offering safe shopping online, were also able to comply with the updated standards and as such set out to simplify the instructions on how this can be achieved. Businesses have until January 2011 to get their systems in line with the updates.