For over two decades, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) has defined security requirements for organizations that process, store, or transmit payment card data. This includes e-commerce businesses, brick-and-mortar retail stores, financial institutions, healthcare providers, hospitality services, and any other entities involved in handling payment transactions.
For these companies, compliance is more than just a legal requirement—it’s key to earning and maintaining customer trust.
With applications now a primary target for cybercriminals, Application Security (AppSec) and code security have become critical for PCI-DSS compliance. Yet, many organizations are relying on siloed tools, which 78% of security professionals say is challenging.
That’s where Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) approach can help.
Keep reading to discover how ASPM simplifies PCI-DSS compliance and what to look for in an effective ASPM platform.
PCI-DSS Recap: What’s New with 4.0?
One crucial aspect to note is the upcoming deadline: organizations have until March 31, 2025, to fully implement PCI-DSS 4.0.
This deadline emphasizes the urgency for businesses to shift from PCI-DSS 3.2.1 and adopt a more programmatic, continuous compliance model. With 64 new requirements, PCI-DSS 4.0 demands a proactive approach to security, especially in maintaining real-time application security.
Here are some key updates from PCI-DSS 4.0:
- Strengthened Authentication: With mandatory multi-factor authentication (MFA) and stricter password requirements, organizations must now implement stronger access controls to prevent unauthorized access. This change forces businesses to prioritize secure authentication mechanisms, reducing the risks associated with credential theft and account breaches.
- Continuous Security Testing: The new focus on ongoing vulnerability scanning and real-time security testing means organizations are required to move beyond annual assessments and embrace continuous monitoring. This shift promotes a proactive security posture, ensuring that vulnerabilities are identified and mitigated promptly, reducing the window of exposure to attacks.
- Focus on Emerging Threats: PCI-DSS 4.0 introduces specific measures to combat modern attack vectors, such as phishing and e-skimming. For organizations, this means they need to stay ahead of evolving cyber threats by continuously updating their defenses, particularly around application security, to safeguard sensitive payment data.
Why is ASPM So Important For PCI-DSS Compliance?
As we mentioned earlier, applications have become a prime target for cybercriminals, putting them at the center of PCI-DSS compliance efforts. However, many organizations still rely on fragmented security tools for AppSec.
This creates several challenges: limited visibility across the software development lifecycle (SDLC), difficulty in prioritizing risks, and slow response times to critical vulnerabilities.
But with an ASPM approach, organizations can:
- Gain a unified, real-time view: Unlike traditional point solutions that provide only partial insights, ASPM offers a single pane of glass across the entire application environment. This real-time visibility ensures that teams can monitor security risks holistically and proactively.
- Prioritize risks effectively: Traditional tools often lack the ability to assess vulnerabilities based on real-world risk. ASPM helps teams prioritize vulnerabilities by assessing their exploitability and potential impact, allowing them to focus on the most critical issues first.
- Take swift action on critical vulnerabilities: Fragmented tools slow down remediation efforts. ASPM, however, facilitates seamless collaboration across security, development, and compliance teams, enabling faster, coordinated responses to high-risk vulnerabilities and ensuring continuous PCI-DSS compliance.
5 PCI Controls To Report on With ASPM
While PCI-DSS has 12 key requirements, several specific controls stand out as particularly challenging to maintain without automated tools like Cycode’s Complete ASPM platform. Below is a closer look at some of the most relevant controls and how Cycode’s platform ensures compliance through its unique capabilities.
Requirement 6: Develop and Maintain Secure Systems and Applications
This control mandates secure coding practices, regular vulnerability reviews, and timely patching to maintain a secure environment.
Challenges with Legacy Tools
Legacy Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools are great for finding vulnerabilities in your own code, but they often work in silos, not focused on DecEx, giving feedback to developers too late in the development process. They also miss third-party components, requiring separate Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools. Juggling legacy SAST and SCA tools can lead to a fragmented security approach, making it harder to get a full picture and slowing down how quickly teams can prioritize and fix the right vulnerabilities at the right time.
How Cycode Helps
- Pipeline Security with Real-Time Scanning: Cycode integrates seamlessly into CI/CD pipelines, enabling continuous, real-time scanning for vulnerabilities and security flaws, even before deployment.
- Automated Secure Coding Practices: Cycode enforces secure coding practices, automatically detecting insecure patterns and applying best practices at every stage of development.
- Code-to-Cloud Visibility: Cycode offers complete visibility from code repositories to cloud infrastructure, allowing teams to trace vulnerabilities from the development environment to production. This end-to-end visibility ensures that application vulnerabilities are addressed holistically.
- Root Cause Analysis: Cycode provides advanced root cause analysis, tracing vulnerabilities back to the exact lines of code or configurations that caused the issue. This helps teams fix problems faster and prevent recurrence.
- Comprehensive Risk Tracking with Cycode RIG: Cycode’s Risk Intelligence Graph (RIG) prioritizes vulnerabilities based on risk factors like exploitability, severity, and context, ensuring that the most critical issues are handled first.
- Third-Party Component Scanning: Cycode scans open-source and third-party software components for vulnerabilities, ensuring that external dependencies comply with PCI-DSS standards.
Requirement 8.6.2: Preventing Hardcoded Secrets in Code
PCI-DSS 4.0 specifically addresses the risks associated with hardcoded credentials through requirement 8.6.2, which mandates that sensitive credentials like passwords and API keys must not be embedded in code or scripts. This requirement is designed to prevent attackers from easily accessing privileged information, which could lead to unauthorized access and data breaches.
Challenges with Traditional Tools
Identity and access management tools help manage authorization and access control, but they often fall short when it comes to detecting hardcoded secrets across diverse environments, particularly in hybrid or cloud-based systems. They also often lack deep visibility into application environments where hardcoded credentials can go undetected.
How Cycode Helps
- Secret Scanning Across Codebases: Cycode’s native secret scanning thoroughly examines code repositories in real-time, detecting hardcoded credentials such as passwords, API keys, and tokens. With broad support for multiple programming languages and environments—including messaging and productivity tools like Slack and Jira—Cycode ensures that sensitive credentials are identified, whether in legacy systems or modern applications.
- Automated Remediation Suggestions: Cycode goes beyond detection by offering automated remediation guidance. When hardcoded credentials are found, Cycode provides actionable steps to remove or replace these secrets, ensuring security gaps are closed quickly without manual intervention.
- Centralized Credential Management: Cycode offers a unified platform to manage credentials across cloud and on-premise environments, minimizing the risk of mismanagement and ensuring that access keys and passwords are properly secured.
- MFA Enforcement and Posture Management: By integrating with identity and access management systems, Cycode helps enforce MFA and role-based access control across all environments, ensuring consistent security practices and protecting critical systems from unauthorized access.
Requirement 11: Regularly Test Security Systems and Processes
This requirement focuses on conducting regular vulnerability scans, both internal and external, to ensure that systems remain secure.
Challenges with Traditional Tools
Again, standalone Application Security Testing (AST) tools (SAST, DAST, and SCA) generally work in isolation, making it virtually impossible to get a comprehensive view of vulnerabilities without manually coordinating between each tool. As highlighted earlier, this can leave gaps in application security coverage and delay remediation.
How Cycode Helps
- Automated Vulnerability Scanning with Proprietary Scanners: Cycode continuously scans for vulnerabilities using its proprietary AST scanners, ensuring that critical threats are identified as they emerge.
- Third-Party and Open-Source Component Scanning: Cycode automatically scans third-party components to detect vulnerabilities in external libraries, which are often overlooked by traditional tools.
- Seamless Integration with Security Tools: Cycode integrates with a full suite of security tools providing a complete view of vulnerabilities across the SDLC.
- Automated Remediation Workflows: Cycode not only identifies vulnerabilities but integrates with issue tracking systems to automate remediation, ensuring critical vulnerabilities are addressed in compliance with PCI-DSS timelines.
Requirement 12: Maintain a Policy that Addresses Information Security
This control requires organizations to establish and maintain formal security policies, covering all aspects of security management, including staff training and regular policy updates.
Challenges with Traditional Tools
Many policy management tools fail to integrate deeply with development processes, making it difficult to enforce security policies consistently across dynamic, cloud-based environments. This disconnect can result in compliance gaps where operational workflows don’t align with security policies.
How Cycode Helps
- Policy Enforcement Within the SDLC: Cycode embeds security policies directly into the SDLC, ensuring compliance across development, testing, and deployment phases. Teams are automatically guided to follow best practices throughout the process.
- Real-Time Compliance Monitoring and Alerts: Cycode monitors adherence to security policies in real-time and sends automated alerts when compliance gaps are detected, ensuring timely corrective actions.
- Automated Policy Updates: As new threats emerge, Cycode updates and enforces security policies automatically, keeping teams informed and aligned with the latest PCI-DSS requirements.
Simplify PCI-DSS Compliance With Cycode Now
Compliance with PCI-DSS doesn’t have to be complicated or resource-draining.
Customers like UBS, PayPal, and Broadcom trust Cycode to streamline their application security processes, provide real-time visibility across the SDLC, and ensure continuous compliance with automated vulnerability management and policy enforcement all in one platform. It’s no wonder 90% of security professionals have plans to consolidate their stack with a solution like Cycode within the next 12 months.
Don’t fall behind. Book a demo now to learn more.
New to ASPM? Check out our ASPM Buyer’s Guide to explore key features and understand how to evaluate vendors.
