PCI Compliance, Internet Security and Web Hosting

Internet security has become quite a hot topic lately, since so much personal and confidential information is used online. Over the past several years, there has been a huge spike in the amount of people that do a majority of their shopping, banking and bill payment online as these services have become increasingly more readily available (not to mention the huge number of small and medium sized businesses operating online with online shopping cart programs such as Miva Merchant.

PCI stands for Payment Card Industry and they are the premier group responsible for making the rules and guidelines that establish the conditions sites engaging in e-commerce activities must operate under. The PCI is an umbrella group containing many experts in the field of Internet security and was originally created by the major credit card companies (MasterCard, Visa, Discover, American Express and JCB). The primary goal of the PCI is to provide and maintain a secure environment across the Internet that is not susceptible to hackers and those with malicious intent.

PCI Compliance applies to anyone that engages in any type of merchant payment activity on the Internet. This could be the smallest Mom and Pop business that operates online to the electric company that processes online payments to the largest international corporation. Needless to say, there are a lot of bases to cover when it comes to PCI Compliance.

Some of the basic requirements of the PCI Compliance guidelines are:

Maintaining a secure network with all proper firewalls and proper password protection

Encryption of all customer’s personal information

Habitual virus scans and make certain that anti-virus software is regularly updated

Quality control of security by regularly testing systems

WebNet Hosting specializes in Miva Hosting solutions, as well as Basic Web Hosting, and Business Web Hosting.

Be sure to visit our web site for more info.

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