January | 2016 | Branden R. Williams, Business Security Specialist

29th of January, 2016
In: Consumer Security, Enterprise Security, Payments
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Gender Differences in Breach Awareness standard

Over the next few posts, I’m going to show you a few more visualizations that didn’t make it in my Consumer Attitudes Toward Breaches report (sponsored by MAC). Most were omitted for brevity as they didn’t add anything material to the content already presented. Below is a graph that shows how consumers reported their awareness of breaches as separated by gender—pink for female, baby blue for male. What made this interesting to me was that even though males were generally more aware of breaches than females, but the two breaches where females were more aware (Michael’s and Target) seem to target that demographic. The respondents split the gender line at almost 50/50 (11 more females responded than males of the 1031 responses). ...

Consumer’s Attitudes on Breaches? Meh. standard

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt… three very dirty words when pushing products at security and IT professionals. Commonly known as FUD, it’s one of the techniques that sales and marketing folks use to create discomfort in their targets. If I can highlight a serious problem to you (and make you think that you have this problem), I might be able to sell you my solution that will make that problem go away. In the information security product space, one of the biggest claims that vendors make is that security breaches impact your brand’s value. I once said that in front of the CFO of a large retail establishment and was quickly called out for making such a general statement (he called ...

We Should Question Bold Claims that PCI Is “Highly Effective” standard

For my first real post of 2016, let’s deconstruct a quote from an article published by eWeek about PCI DSS and 2016. The quote in question is from Jeremy King, International Director for the Council. “The PCI DSS is a mature standard that has proven highly effective wherever it is adopted and used.” The rest of the quotes fall along the messaging guidelines that you hear from the Council (although this appears to be more of a pitch related to the logging SIG), but this one stuck out for me. It reads like something that wants to be true versus something that actually is true. In the Council’s defense, they will readily cite that no fully PCI DSS compliant merchant has ever been breached. ...

Top Posts from 2015 standard

2015 is over and in the books. It was a pretty busy year for those of us in security & payments. My company went IPO, the largest compliance provider sold (instead of IPO), adult websites were hacked and in some cases extorted, new books and publications, lots of blogs, a step back on SSL restrictions, and EMV. Thanks for continuing to stop by and check out my content. Looking forward to a great 2016 and I will see you at a conference soon! Here’s what you folks liked the most in 2015: Is The Council Trying to Kill the QSA Program? Obviously, any post where you reference Christina Aguilera is going to be something you all will love. The Council finally ...

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