Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard

An information security standard used to handle credit cards from major card brands. The standard is administered by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council, and its use mandated by the card brands. The standard was created to better control cardholder data and reduce credit card fraud. Validation of compliance is performed quarterly or annually by a method suited to the volume of transactions handled, like a Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ), a firm-specific Internal Security Assessor (ISA), or an external Qualified Security Assessor (QSA). PCI DSS was started as a combined effort by the principal credit card organizations to address interoperability problems among previously existing standards, leading to the release of version 1.0 of PCI DSS in 2004. ← Wikipedia