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PCI Configuration Audit dashboard

by Cesar Navas
June 8, 2016

PCI Configuration Audit Screenshot

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) helps entities understand and implement standards for security policies, technologies and ongoing processes that protect their payment systems from breaches and theft of cardholder data. The standards have historically been revised on a 2-3 year cycle, but the PCI SSC is transitioning to a posture of revising the PCI DSS as required based on changes to the current threat landscape. The current standard revision is PCI DSS Version 4.x. Any organization that handles payment card information must comply with the PCI DSS and must demonstrate compliance annually. Tenable Security Center is able to help organizations monitor ongoing PCI DSS compliance.

The PCI Configuration Audit dashboard presents extensive data about the configuration status of the network based on the available data. The dashboard can be used to gain insight into all configuration results, or it can be modified to focus exclusively on the results related to the cardholder data environment (CDE). Organizations can configure repositories or asset lists in order to tailor the focus of the dashboard. When the dashboard is added from the Tenable Security Center Feed, the appropriate assets, IP addresses, or repositories can be specified. Assigning one of the options to the dashboard will update all filters in the components. Security teams can use this dashboard to identify and monitor configuration adjustments across the organization.

Components within this dashboard also focus on configuration data gathered from all available configuration scan results. The components are filtered for failed and manual configuration checks based on severity in order to identify checks specifically related to ongoing PCI security requirements. Failed configuration checks are identified as high severity, and checks requiring manual verification are identified as medium severity. Identifying and remediating failed configuration checks are especially important to ensuring ongoing adherence with PCI DSS. Configuration checks are tracked by time, severity, and host in order to provide a thorough perspective on the configuration status of the network.

Organizations can assess their level of adherence with PCI requirements focusing on configuration auditing. The components in this dashboard are focused on PCI requirements which cover: network security controls, secure configurations, malicious software, and authentication.

This dashboard is available in the Tenable Security Center Feed, a comprehensive collection of dashboards, reports, Assurance Report Cards, and assets. The dashboard can be easily located in the Tenable Security Center Feed under the category Compliance & Configuration Assessments. The dashboard requirements are:

  • Tenable Secuirty Center
  • Nessus 

Tenable's Tenable Security Center Continuous View (CV) provides continuous network monitoring, vulnerability identification, risk reduction, and compliance monitoring. Tenable Security Center is continuously updated with information about advanced threats and zero-day vulnerabilities, and new types of regulatory compliance configuration audits. Tenable Nessus Network Monitor (NNM) performs deep packet inspection to enable discovery and assessment of operating systems, network devices, hypervisors, databases, tablets, phones, web servers, cloud applications, and critical infrastructure. Tenable Log Correlation Engine (LCE) performs deep log analysis and correlation to continuously discover and track systems, applications, cloud infrastructure, trust relationships, and vulnerabilities. By integrating with Nessus, and NNM, Tenable Security Centers continuous network monitoring is able to detect systems and vulnerabilities across the enterprise.

This dashboard contains the following components:

  • PCI Monitoring - Configuration Trends: The “PCI Monitoring - Configuration Trends” trend component displays the trend of configuration checks over the last 3 months
  • PCI Monitoring - Configuration Summary: The “PCI Monitoring - Configuration Summary” matrix displays the counts and ratios of passed, failed, and manual configuration checks
  • Understanding Risk - Remediation Opportunities: This table displays the top remediations for the network
  • CSF - Compliance Checks By Keyword: This component uses results from the compliance audit to trigger on specific plugin keywords
  • PCI Monitoring - Top Failures and Manual Checks: The “PCI Monitoring - Top Failures and Manual Checks” table lists the configuration checks that failed or require manual verification on the greatest number of hosts
  • Prioritize Hosts - Top Hosts with Compliance Concerns: This table displays the top hosts on the network that have either compliance failures or compliance checks that must be performed manually