PCI SSC European community meeting Dublin - October 2012

Following on from the North America Community Meeting held in Orlando last month, the Ground Labs team traveled onto Dublin where the PCI council held it's European Community Meeting at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS).

Whilst this was a smaller event compared to it's North American counterpart, there were still over 500 attendees including a large number of QSA's present from all parts of Europe and a small delegation from the Asia Pacific region.

As always the PCI council's European Director Jeremy King lead this event and highlighted the rapid advancement of PCI Compliance across Europe including the high level of involvement from European stakeholders involved with the council.

The special guest speaker for Europe this year was Mark Gallagher of Status Grand Prix. Mark provided an interesting presentation highlighting many lessons he has learned throughout his F1 career.

Mark was able to articulate how many of the challenges his team's have faced are similar to problems we as a Payment Card Industry are challenged by on a constant basis. It was very clear by the end of the presentation that no matter whether you are responsible for securing payment cardholder data, leading an F1 team to victory or running any other type of business, the importance of sound risk management, team building, or ensuring a focus on your client's needs are important elements to achieving success.

The agenda was similar to North America with topics covered on the Council's current initiatives including Point-to-Point Encryption, Qualified Integrators and Resellers (QIR), and the new Payment Card Industry Professional Program (PCIP).

Also presenting on stage was Nick Percoco of Spiderlabs who provided insights into current mobile security threats. Nick provided a series of live demonstrations showing exploits in both Apple and Android mobile operating systems. In one particular demo Nick demonstrated an Android exploit whereby the login page of popular apps such as mobile internet banking or Facebook could be overlaid with a fake login page designed to capture and transmit login information to a remote host. Ironically after contacting Google to alert them about this potential exploit, Google's response was that it is a feature and will not be fixed! The mobile world clearly plenty of attack vectors that will continue to be exploited, particularly as the growth of smart phones and tablets is predicted to hit 2 billion devices by 2015 (that's a little over 2 years away..)

As with many of the PCI SSC's events there were some great party's held at the end of each day. On day #1 (22/10), Vigitrust held a welcome after-party at Cafe En Seine in the heart of Dublin. This french-themed cafe/bar venue offered all delegates the opportunity to meet in relaxed setting over local beers and wine. On the final evening Vendorcom held a final party at the world renowned Guinness Store-House.

The night included a brief tour on the way up to the event room showing when the Guinness Brewery started and how Guinness Beer is made. And of course almost everyone was drinking the dark stuff all night and enjoying it too (as the photos will show!).

Back at the event, Ground Labs along with a strong showcase of over 30 PCI compliance vendors were present for attendees to visit over the 2 main days of the event. Other vendors present included Airtight Networks, Xypro, Alert Logic, Vormetric, Aperia Solutions, Voltage Security, Cisco, Vigitrust, Comforte, Verizon, Control Case, Veritape, Dell Secureworks, Verifone, Firehost, Trustwave, Fishnet Security, Sysnet Global Solutions, Foregenix, SSH Communications Security, IOActive, Semafone, IScan online, Security Metrics, Liaison Technologies, SAINT, Mako Networks, Protegrity, Pixalert, and NNT Security.

And finally, a special congratulations must go to Kunal Taneja from AFS who was the lucky winner of our iPhone 5 prize draw. Congratulations Kunal and watch out for that new Apple maps app!

To view, all the event photos please log on to Facebook page and give us the Thumbs Up on anything you liked.