PCI London January 2014

With the recent announcements from some major US retailers suffering a data breach over the December - January holiday period, this year's PCI London event came at just the right time.

As expected, a great deal of discussion revolved around these recent US data breaches and it was also the first PCI London to occur since the PCI DSS 3.0 draft standard was released last year.

All these factors combined resulted in the largest number of attendees since the event started 5 years ago, drawing over 400 end-user delegates and a maxed-out vendor showcase floor.

Presentations throughout the day covered a variety of topics starting with Jeremy King from the PCI Security Standards Council discussing the applicability of PCI Compliance in a world that is continually changing.

Ron Khalifa from Worldpay gave an acquirers perspective on PCI compliance, discussing the challenges of assisting a large customer base to become PCI compliant, and later in the day, Chris Mark from AT&T gave the keynote address reflecting on his 10+ years in PCI compliance. We all know of Chris from his days running the famous PCI Answers portal which eventually became the Aegenis Group with Mike Dahn and the team.

Ground Labs presented the latest Cardholder Data Discovery strategies with particular focus on the ability for Card Recon and Enterprise Recon to search system memory as combat against memory scraping malware used in the recent US data breaches. There was considerable interest in Card Recon 2.0's latest features which included Cloud Storage scanning and Remediation using Cardholder Data Masking.

On the main floor Ground Labs along with many of our partners and friends including Nettitude, Veritape, and YesPay were networking with the attendees, answering questions about PCI compliance and Cardholder Data Discovery whilst giving live demonstrations of Card Recon and Enterprise Recon.

The day finished off on a high note with John Elliott from Visa Europe giving an entertaining Q&A session on PCI DSS 3.0 answering questions like Is Visa PCI DSS 3.0 Compliant? (Of course not... The standard has barely had time to breathe) through to What is the biggest impact PCI DSS 3.0 has on merchants.

John answered every question in his unique and fun manner with plenty of laughs's being heard throughout the audience. It was clearly the most engaging presentation we have ever seen in the final time slot of PCI London and hopefully will encourage more attendees to hold back until the very end of next year if we can encourage John to speak again in this format.

On a historical note, John used to be a QSA and was one of Card Recon's greatest supporters, and provided fantastic product feedback which has helped Card Recon become the tool it is today.

The next PCI London event will be held on July 1, 2014. Please visit the PCI series event website for more information.