There seems to be a belief these days that complying with the PCI standard is bound to be expensive and difficult to put in place. Actually if you have a Linux system, this doesn't have to be the case at all. However, while a Linux system is generally thought to be better for security, nevertheless, there are weaknesses to Linux that could be exploited by a potential hacker, and knowing these weaknesses and knowing how to deal with these weaknesses can be crucial to the server administrator who wants to ensure that his systems and networks are PCI complaint.
The PCI Security Standards Council, also referred to as PCI SSC, has launched on the 10th of March 2011 the PCI ASV Training program for improving the quality of the ASV (Approved Scanning Vendor) services for merchants and other service providers using cardholder information.
With the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council releasing their new standards version, PCI DSS 2.0, it is important to take a look at the security of your Linux server. Since the cPanel brand control panel and Web Host Manager software is the most popular control panel for Linux servers, we will cover achieving PCI compliance on a cPanel server.
Of the 12 new changes to the standards, the best part of the new PCI DSS rules is a change to rule 2.2.1, which specifically allows for virtualization. Such as using a VPS running Linux with Xen.
Setting up a firewall for IPtables can be rather difficult, especially if its your first time. A firewall is something you need to have, whether you are just trying to keep hackers
out, or trying to meet a requirement such as PCI compliance, or HIIPA compliance. Luckily the folks at rfxnetworks, created a CLI based configuration for IPtables.
Well you can ask them "are you PCI complaint?" However you shouldn't take their answer at face value.
Recently, pretending to be a potential customer with an ecommerce website, I asked 10 random Linux hosts if their shared hosting plan was PCI compliant.
Every day in the news you hear about
someone
getting hacked, and even though you are secure today, you might not be
tomorrow. Here's how to find out if your website is secure.
Backups are a total waste of time,
resources, and money...until you need one. Find out how many backups
you should have, and how many your host should have.
