With PCI Education PCI Security Council - Courses, Title, Benefits

PCI Security Council is the establishment of standards and compliance training arm to a consortium of five card payment processor, Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Discover Card, Japan Credit Bureau and. Council role is to establish common standards for the security of online transactions is five founding companies approve and promote the bank that offers card payment with one of the 5 logo. The banks, in turn, may require PCI requirements that must be met by the vendors and online service providers that they have an account with.

To provide education for PCI security compliance services online which help the individual trader and online service providers set up their system to be secure and compliant, PCI Security Council provides a range of courses and an appropriate certificate. PCI training courses are named after the title participants gained after they pass the corresponding test at the end of the course. Each of these titles will allow participants to provide some components of the PCI compliance audit.

Title PCI educational training are available: QSA, PA-QSA, ASV, ISA.

QSA Training - Qualified Security Assessor to be

By attending and passing the final exam at this course, a person becomes a Qualified Security Assessor. QSAs are allowed during the course of the year to provide PCI DSS compliance audits, or PCI Data Security Standard compliance audits using the PCI compliance checklist with companies who process payment cards online. QSAs must be re-certified annually, and PCI DSS compliance audits must be executed annually as well. QSAs are allowed to run their own PCI compliance service business.

PA-QSA training - become a Payment Application Qualified Security Assessor

This course will prepare you to work with software companies who produce payment card processing software. You will be certified to assess compliance of such software companies with the PCI PA-DSS standard. Adherence of the software to this standard means that the software is designed to securely process payment cards. PA-QSAs must be re-certified yearly.

ASV training - become an Approved Scanning Vendor

Besides the annual PCI DSS compliance audits, companies must also perform quarterly scans of their internet-facing connections for security vulnerabilities of any sorts. These scans must be performed by ASVs, and you can become qualified to offer PCI scans to the companies by passing the ASV exam after receiving the ASM training. The ASVs must be re-certified yearly.

ISA training - become an Internal Security Assessor

This title makes sense for larger companies only. When your company has many PCI DSS certifications to pass, you can have an employee with IT experience attend the ISA training with the PCI Security Council and pass the ISA training exam. Very similar in scope to the QSA training exam, becoming an ISA will allow you to internally execute PCI security audits without needing to seek help from the sources outside of the company.