To distinguish the size of merchant companies and appropriately determine the level of testing required, the founding credit card companies created four different brackets ranging from Tier 1 to 4. Each tier is based on the number of transactions processed per year by the merchant and also dictates the testing a merchant must undertake. While transactions are the primary determiner, a merchant can...

The retail industry saw more than its fair share of data breaches in 2017, with security incidents impacting at American supermarket chain Whole Foods Market and clothing companies Brooks Brothers , The Buckle , and Forever 21 , to name a few. At least some of those events likely resulted from retailers' poor data breach preparation. Consider the fact that just 28 percent of IT security...

Despite retailers’ continuous improvement in compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) security standards, four out of five companies are still failing at interim assessments, according to Verizon’s latest report . The report highlights that the overall state of compliance grew significantly in 2014, with 20 percent of organizations achieving full compliance – up from 11 percent in 2013, and...