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PCI-DSS Card Data Discovery Scans

January 24, 2022 / / 0 Comments
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For PCI-DSS, there are some fairly obvious requirements that are set in stone in order for you to pass PCI-DSS. ASV scans quarterly. Internal vulnerability scans – quarterly. Annual penetration testing. Half yearly reviews of firewall config and policies. Annual training awareness. These are biblical principles of the gospel of PCI.

And then again, there are other areas where interpretation is a little more of a touch and go; up in the air; subjective to the wind; sort of the things where there are as much disagreements and controversies as whether Han shot first or Greedo was just an absolute tool who misses from two feet.

And while most arguments often stems from our clients and us as we try to explain some concepts to them, there comes once in a while a subject where we find ourselves against the explanation of QSAs. Now, not all QSAs are created equal. When I say QSAs here, I refer to the individual QSA, not the organisation QSA. As in the human being who are QSAs for the QSA-C (QSA Company). We’ve worked with some who are technically well versed; we’ve worked with some who are strong in documentation and theory, we’ve worked with some who can communicate well but not so technical, and those who are opposite. But every once in a while, we come across QSAs who think they know everything (they don’t), and they stubbornly stick to a point of argument even when we have exhausted all avenues to show them their point is flawed. The more we argue, the more adamant they take their stance even if their justifications seem to be plucked directly out of their …. posterior appendages.

One of the items you will often see coming up in PCI-DSS is this thing called the Credit Card Discovery Scanner (CDD). What is this? In PCI-DSS standard pg 10:

To confirm the accuracy of the defined CDE, perform the following:
The assessed entity identifies and documents the existence of all cardholder data in their environment, to verify that no cardholder data exists outside of the currently defined CDE.

PCI DSS v3.2.1

The CDD process is basically just a process using a tool usually to identify whether card information is stored in the clear within the organisation. These are usually regular expressions based applications; where it can categorise the type of card based on BIN or the initial numbers. These tools are often quite useful as well to find other forms of information like personal information etc, as long as you can identify filters and regular expressions for them. Some tools out there are from Groundlabs, Managed Engine, ControlCase etc. We also have free CDD tools like Pan Buster, Credit Card Scanner etc. The free tools are a little bit more difficult to use in our opinion and there seems to be less support for database scans and more false positives overall, so you may spend a longer time cleaning up the results.

Whether commercial or free tools, what PCI has been fairly silent about is whether these are mandated in the standard to be done. Unlike ASV scans or penetration testing, the standard doesn’t specifically state the need to run these tools for a normal PCI-DSS standard. When I say ‘normal’; I refer to a set of additional requirements under Appendix A3: Designated Entities Supplemental Validation (DESV) . These are specially assigned entities that has large volume of card data or has suffered significant breaches. This is designated by payment brands or acquirers, and it’s not something a QSA or even the audited entity decides on.

So looking into the card data scan requirements; we only have the Pg 10 scoping requirement and in the DESV portion , A.3.2.5 – “Implement a data-discovery methodology to confirm PCI DSS scope and to locate all sources and locations of clear-text PAN at least quarterly and upon significant changes to the cardholder environment or processes”

In most cases, CDD scans are done on an annual basis for normal PCI-DSS (non DESV), or at times half-yearly as required by the QSA.

So along came another QSA who stoutly declares that all companies are required to do a quarterly CDD scan regardless of size for all systems in scope. When politely reminded that he seems to be mixing up the DESV quarterly scan requirements; he says no. He is highlighting requirement 3.1: “A quarterly process for identifying and securely deleting stored cardholder data that exceeds defined retention.”

When pressed to explain why this is a CDD scan, he states its obvious, that everyone needs to run the CDD scanner every quarter to address this requirement.

OK. We disagree. Completely. This is one of the instance, where QSA super-imposes requirements on each other just because it sounds the same.

Let’s break it down by looking at the PURPOSE of the CDD scan. And the best way is to go back to the standard and pick up the part where the standard states a ‘data-discovery’ method in DESV A3.2.5.

Implement a data-discovery methodology to confirm PCI DSS scope and to locate all sources and locations of clear-text PAN

A3.2.5 PCI-DSS V3.2.1

It’s clear that the CDD purpose is to locate where CLEAR-TEXT PAN is found in the CDE (and non-CDE) environment. Why is this important? Because in the CDE, there should never be any clear-text PAN found in storage. All PANs must be protected by either of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Encryption, Truncation, Hashing or Tokenization. A failed CDD means there are card PAN found in clear text within the CDE.

So with that in mind, lets go back to requirement 3.1. This is nothing to do with identifying clear PAN. It talks about identifying AND deleting EXPIRED card data (based on retention policies). That’s it. If the PAN is encrypted or tokenized but its stored beyond its retention period; requirement 3.1 tells you to delete it. It talks about retention period and storage beyond it. Which part of it talks about doing a card data scan to identify clear text card information?

In the description, it further states: A quarterly process for identifying and securely deleting stored cardholder data that exceeds defined retention requirements.

So QSA, please RTFM; requirement 3.1 isn’t talking about the need to run CDD quarterly to identify clear-text PAN storage; it is to run something (script) or manual; to identify PAN storage that is already expired. It is to discover duration of storage; not security of storage. Running a shell script may be good enough to get the timestamp of files; or checking the timestamp on the database entries to ensure that all card data is removed or anonymized after a period of say, 7 years.

If you need assistance in PCI-DSS or any other compliance standards like the ISMS or ITSM, drop us a note at pcidss@pkfmalaysia.com. We can help clarify some of these annoying requirements that even QSAs (as experienced as they are) are plucking out of their rear appendages.

PCI-DSS 2022 and Version 4

January 13, 2022 / / 0 Comments
pci-compliance

So we are now in 2022. PCI-DSS v4.0 is due to be out and one of the things we have been doing for the first two weeks of the year is to get over our holiday hangovers. That’s right. In our country (Malaysia), the slowest months are December, January and February. It’s like starting a car in the dead of winter. These 3 months are like the Amen Corner in Augusta for businesses. December hits like a ton of bricks due to the Christmas season; and then just when things start moving in January, it grinds to a halt for Chinese New Year, where the entire nation just flat out refuses to work. When we are back in the second week of Chinese New Year, we are once more in first gear climbing up the hill again of 2022.

So we did things a bit differently. We started the first two weeks with a series of training for clients and potential clients, to go through PCI-DSS v4.0 and create an awareness of what is there to expect.

The above is taken from the PCI website and immediately we see some interesting things here. Number one: PCI-DSS v3.2.1 only retires in 2024. This is interesting, because usually the transition period isn’t so long. It’s long now because – I don’t know, there may be an ongoing pandemic and such. So here we are Q1 2022, and our customers are asking when do we transition to v4.0?

Well, the answer would be: as soon as you can. But in theory, you can probably stick to v3.2.1 validation for 2022 and realistically move to v4.0 in 2023. In fact, for some of our clients whose PCI maintenance period follows the calendar year, they can even force 3.2.1 into their 2023 validation year.

As for the actual content in PCI v4, it’s still a well kept secret like the plot of Spiderman: No Way Home; but we have been reading a bit and also have joined last year’s PCI-DSS community meeting and learnt some interesting tid-bits of it.

No 1: Compensating Controls

The-get-out-of-jail-free card. Customers have been dangling this Compensating Controls card in front of our faces ever since the Mesopotamian times. When they can’t address a control – use compensating controls! When they cannot implement something due to budget – compensating controls! When they can’t make changes to an application because it was designed by a group of kindergarten kids and it would break the moment you touch it – Compensating Controls! When you don’t know what to say to your wife after a long night out at the pub with the mates and come back smelling like a keg of kerosene – Compensating Controls!

The problem with compensating controls is that they are a pain in the neck to implement and to document. And to justify. The compensating control worksheet, the justification documentation, the implementation of the control itself to be ‘above and beyond’ the scope of PCI-DSS etc. Everyone things this is a silver bullet only to find it the deepest rabbit hole you can ever fall into.

So, PCI v4 does away with compensating controls. Great.

And they introduce Customized Implementation.

A lot of people are saying this is a game changer.

Honestly? Until more information comes out, we only have this to go with:


Customized implementation considers the intent of the objective and allows entities to design their own security controls to meet it. Once an organization determines the security control for a given objective, it must provide full documentation to enable their Qualified Security Auditor (QSA) to make a final decision on the effectiveness of a control.

Cryptic PCI v4 DOCUMENTATION

Design their own security controls? Well, ok, isn’t this the same as compensating controls? I am thinking this just expands the interpretation to something a bit broader in which case the control may not even be a technical control. So instead of stating , ok, we can’t meet certain password controls due to the legacy application issue, and compensating controls were previously excessive logging and monitoring; isolation of network, whitelisting of IPs and access; using WAF and DLP and Virtual patching etc etc; are we stating now, a possible customized approach would be: instead of all these technical controls; we now have a customized security approach. Which includes isolation of network, whitelisting of IPs and access; using WAF and DLP and Virtual patching etc etc.

Until we see some examples of this, it may just be well that most companies will go along with the ‘normal’ approach; or adopt a wait and see approach and eke out the last remaining drop of v3.2.1. into 2024.

No 2: UP in the Clouds

Another item that has been long overdue? Cloud. It’s about time things get addressed and not just cloud, but how services and containers work as well. We have had auditors coming to our clients insisting on them doing testing, VA/PT on services from AWS, not recognizing there’s not even an IP address to start with. To be fair to the SSC, they do have a few Cloud Guidelines Supplementary documentation, which we actually find very useful especially in our projects on certifying cloud technologies. We can see this being incorporated more formally into v4.0 where the requirements will be designed around Cloud environment more organically than what we see right now (sort of force-fitting many of the traditional concepts like Network IDS, Patching etc into the cloud environment).

No 3: Not another MF-A!

I have a bad feeling about this.

MFA has been a constant pain for us. Firstly, where MFA is being implemented – not just on perimeter but now on every access to the CDE. At least it’s now still on admin accounts. We hear they plan to introduce for ALL users. We also hear the collective screams of the tormented from the nine hells of Dante. Secondly, a lot of customers are still depending on MFA via SMS. If PCI goes along the NIST route, we could see this being deprecated soon. Also, clarifications as well on whether client side certificate are acceptable as a ‘something you have’ factor would be most welcomed. We see different QSAs interpreting this so differently you’d think we’ve asked them to interpret some ancient Thuggee text. Multi-factor challenges are already there for us over the past years, with Bank Negara’s RMIT focus on ‘strong MFA’ for large financial institutions. A clear guidance also should be there on how to evaluate multi-factor that is dependent on a cloud provider; and whether common implementation like Google Authentication etc can still be considered as good enough for V4.0

No 4: Encrypting everything

We also hear now that the “Pocket Protector Trope” security may be implemented. Remember those movies we watch, where the hero gets shot in the chest and you think he dies but he reveals that the bullet is stopped by his pocket watch; his badge; a bible; or some other dang sentimental thing that was given to him like 40 scenes ago?

So in PCI, usually when data is traversing the internet or network, it states the transmission needs to be encrypted. It doesn’t technically state anything about encrypting the data package itself while in transmission. The data encryption almost exclusive occurs during data at rest. So in this case, they are doubling the protection: They are adding that pocket watch to catch the bullet; so if the transmission gets compromised, the data is still secured. The bullet doesn’t hit the hero!

No 5: Recovery and Continuity

Not so much as something coming, but more of what we’d like to see. One of the biggest criticism we see customers bemoaning at PCI (other than the cost and budget and the complexity and..ok, everything else) – is that PCI has little focus on business continuity and disaster recovery. It’s almost as if PCI is standing there saying, “OK, you have outage for a few days? Great, make sure your credit card information is safe.” It’s not really business focused, it’s more credit card confidentiality focus. What we would like to see is a little more focus on this area. Over the past 2 years, we have seen customers getting all sorts of attacks from cyberspace. Malware, ransomware, hacking, fraud, defacement — it’s like the world goes into a pandemic and everyone’s bored to bits at home and everyone is taking up hacking as a part time gig. Malware for instance – how prepared is a PCI compliant company against ransomware attack? Have they done their backups? Have they tested their systems to recover?

So, if you have any queries on PCIv4 for us, drop us an email at pcidss@pkfmalaysia.com and we will definitely get back to you. Have a great and safe year ahead for 2022!

Official Announcement AT&T Cybersecurity on sales hold for Alienvault

November 18, 2021 / / 0 Comments

As previously announced, USM Appliance will be placed on a new sales hold effective January 1st, 2022.

What does that mean for me?

All net new sales of USM Appliance to new customers will be discontinued. Any new USM Appliance orders placed until December 31st, 2021 will be accepted. Renewals and expansions to existing deployments will continue to be accepted until December 31st, 2023. A sales hold is NOT a declaration of any end of support; AT&T will continue to provide support through December 31st, 2024

How can I continue to support my customers?

AT&T Cybersecurity is committed to providing our customers with innovative security solutions. USM Anywhere, our SaaS-based solution, will continue to be the focus and flagship product for our Threat Detection and Response offerings.

Please take a look at https://cybersecurity.att.com/products/USM-Anywhere for more information on USM Anywhere. If you have any questions, you can reach out to us at alienvault@pkfmalaysia.com.

Alienvault Appliance End of Sales and End of Life

September 27, 2021 / / 2 Comments

All good things must come to an end.

Over the weekend, AT&T put an official announcement out to all partners what we have been informed weeks earlier, that the Alienvault Appliance has now got an expiry date in terms of its life. Since we picked up Alienvault six years ago, dealing with the small support team out from Spain and sales team from Cork, Ireland, it has been a good ride and we’ve learnt massively a lot through the years. AT&T is steering into a different direction, and Alienvault is moving completely into cloud, putting an end to the ever popular All-in-Ones and Standard Appliance. We will miss the days of writing plugins for our clients.

Anyway, here is our official announcement:

27th September 2021

Alienvault USM Appliance End of Sales (EOS) and End of Life (EOL) Announcement

There has been an official announcement from AT&T to all channel partners dated 25th September 2021, that the Alienvault USM Appliance will be placed on a new sales hold effective January 1, 2022. AT&T will also no longer support the USM Appliance effective January 1, 2025. These dates are effectively the End of Sales (EOS) and End of Life (EOL) dates for the USM Appliance (otherwise known as Alienvault On-Premise). If your solution is an “All-in-One”, “USM Standard” or “USM Enterprise”, these solutions will be the ones affected by this announcement.

As one of the first partners of Alienvault in Malaysia since 2015, we are saddened with the news that the popular USM Appliance solution will no longer be available from 2022 onwards. We therefore require any new sales made (either from us or from our partners) from now till 31st December 2021 to inform the potential customer of the above EOL and EOS dates to ensure that purchases are made with this information clearly stated. This is to avoid any miscommunication of expectations to the end-user. Additionally, we will cease all local maintenance support renewal from the date of this letter. The local maintenance support includes arrangements for 24×7, or 8×5 call or onsite support from PKF directly. We will continue to honour all ongoing contracts until the contract expiry. This is in line with us re-allocating our technical resources and focus to other solutions and initiatives. The annual maintenance support and threat intelligence subscription from AT&T will still be continued until 31st December 2024. PKF will still be continuing our quarterly preventive maintenance or any ad-hoc professional service to assist our clients on USM Appliance matters. In summary, the cease dates are as follows:

As we move our focus away from the USM Appliance in both sales and support, we would recommend a transition plan to be in place. This can include the option to move to USM Anywhere, which is the direct transition to AT&T’s SaaS based SIEM. Please contact us at alienvault@pkfmalaysia.com for further details in moving forward.

Thank you for your support all these years and we hope that we can continue to work together for many years to come.


PCI-DSS and Card Storage

August 29, 2021 / / 0 Comments
pci-compliance

We had an interesting discussion a few weeks back about storage in PCI-DSS. We disagreed with an acquirer’s position in how PCI-DSS views storage and therefore opened a whole can of … interesting debate.

The problem the acquirer had with our position was simple. We have a client who is currently doing a data migration import from another service provider to their document management system. Amongst the terabytes of data were possible scanned copies of credit card information, either in forms or actual card photo-copies themselves. Now, we are talking about terabytes.

Our position was fairly straightforward. Do you need these card data? We asked. No, said our client. We don’t need the card data as we do recon and backoffice operations on other form of identification. Can these information be removed or redacted? Bemused, they said, possibly, but the problem is that there are going to be millions of records to be dealt with.

Well, is there a way we can sanitize the data before it enters into your environment?

Yes, possibly, we need to ask the acquirer to ask their current provider to do it for us.

The provider you are taking business away from?

Yes.

Good luck…

And sure enough, the acquirer responded and asked us, “Shouldn’t PCI-DSS allow the storage of these card information, and how your client is able to deal with it? Why do you insist on us redacting and removing the card information? What then is the purpose of PCI-DSS??”

Now, on the surface, that argument does make sense. After all PCI-DSS applies to entities who store, transmit and process credit card information right? Why then wouldn’t we want our client to store credit card information if they are going through PCI-DSS?

Unfortunately, this is a case of getting the solution (PCI-DSS) mixed up with the problem(storing card data). In other words, in a more current analogy, just because I got vaccinated doesn’t mean I would purposely go out and try to get infected so that the vaccine has something to do. The purpose of PCI isn’t for you to store credit card. It’s for you to manage the storage of credit card IF you store it. Storing credit card isn’t a PCI-DSS objective, its an issue that PCI-DSS tries to solve.

So back to this little kerfuffle; if they pass us terabytes of information with card data, our client will need to figure a way to protect this data. Likely encryption of any information that card data is present, which includes key management etc. If they can redact it and remove it before it enters into our client’s environment, then we avoid it. We are basically following the concept of PCI-DSS :

Requirement 3 addresses protection of stored cardholder data. Merchants who do not store any cardholder data automatically provide stronger protection by having eliminated a key target for data thieves. Remember if you don’t need it, don’t store it!

PCI-DSS Prioritized approach

If we don’t need it, don’t store it. In this case, we don’t need it, so we are trying to escape storing it. However, if this cannot be done (which likely it won’t be), then we just need to put controls in there. We’re trying to get our clients to do less and we are also trying to remove card footprints in other areas, thus reducing the risks to the card brands, and likely save the world from impending disaster and destruction.

However, we do have another issue.

Because there is potentially CVV storage (photocopy of cards front and back) and scanned into softcopies, we have a bit of a problem. CVV cannot be stored in any format or in any media post authorisation. So therefore, if this is being dumped into our client’s environment, it’s imperative someone removes this information. To us, its a lot easier to remove it at source; but unfortunately that means there is an effort to be spent on it, which no one is willing to do.

How the CVV got stored in the first place is a question that we don’t have an answer to. However, we do know that if CVV is present, we cannot just encrypt it and be done with it. We will need to remove these information one by one. There are a few solutions out there that can do auto redaction and be applied to a massive amount of files, provided that the files are in a sort of standard fashion. That could be a solution on this, but again, it’s beyond what we are discussing for this article.

The point is, having PCI-DSS doesn’t automatically mean we MUST store card data. It simply means IF we store card data we are applying PCI-DSS controls to that storage of card data.

Let us know if you need more information about PCI-DSS or any IT standard compliance like ISO27001 or CSA/SOC, we are ready to assist, just contact us here. Stay safe everyone!

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