Last month’s revelation that Okta had been hacked created a seismic impact in the world of security, with organizations still bracing themselves for the fallout from this incident. While resources, like Microsoft’s article on Lapsus$ (tracked as DEV-0537), have broadly dissected the attack vectors used in the group’s attacks, we wanted to expand on the broader trends and context surrounding the Okta hack.

Network segmentation is a practice that can dramatically lower the time, effort and cost of a PCI DSS assessment. Not only is it an industry best practice for security cardholder data, but it’s also an effective way of controlling the annual commitment of meeting your PCI compliance requirements. Here’s how network segmentation works, as well as some key best practices for using network segmentation to reduce the scope of your PCI assessment.

PCI compliance applies to businesses of all sizes: In fact, the PCI Council sets compliance standards according to how many card-based transactions a business handles each year. There are four merchant levels are Small businesses usually fall under level four. If you’re not sure what level your business falls into, your point-of-sale (POS) reports may be able to tell you.

PCI DSS stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. This standard is set forth by the PCI Security Standards Council, an organization founded in 2006 by American Express, Discover, JCB International, Mastercard and Visa Inc. The PCI DSS sets security rules for any business that accepts their cards, with the goal of protecting customer credit and debit card data. Any business that accepts any non-cash payments needs to meet the PCI standards.

PCI compliance is a complicated matter. There are a number of different steps to meet and validate your achievement of the PCI DSS standard. In this guide, we’ll break down the steps in PCI compliance testing, the different types of PCI compliance tests, and how much it costs to complete this process.