PCI Europe Amsterdam December 2011

December welcomed PCI Europe, the last conference of the PCI series for 2011 this time held in the charming city of Amsterdam at the 5 star Hotel Okura.

PCI Europe is a well known PCI compliance event for the region with delegates travelling from across Europe, Scandinavia, Iceland and Russia to attend this event. The delegation included Security Professionals from Payment Service Providers, Merchants, Acquiring Banks, Issuing Banks, Retailers, Security Vendors.

The agenda of the day provided management and technical advice, examples of best practice and practical case studies. The conference detailed how organisations can overcome compliance challenges, address critical security issues, reduce the risk of a data breach and ensure an effective response should a data compromise occur.

As the Principal Sponsor of the event, Ground Labs played a key role throughout the day hosting both a main-stage presentation and educational seminars on Cardholder Data Discovery.

Mohamed Zouine, our Director of Corporate Development for EMEA presented on the identifying ‘unknown unknowns’ that exist within a typical corporate environment and how Cardholder Data Discovery can be used to eliminate this conundrum. Mohamed emphasised the significant threat of data breaches occurring and the importance of using the controls mandated by the PCI DSS as a defence mechanism to avoid being the next victim of compromise.

Ground Labs also led two education sessions, the first led by our Director of Corporate Development, Stephen Cavey. Stephen presented on the use of Cardholder Data discovery to establish true PCI scope. A live demonstration of Card Recon was shown to the audience, to explain how simple and fast Cardholder Data Discovery can be used to find many of the common storage risks that normally exist in a typical organisation. Card Recon is normally used for scanning workstations and servers to identify any unencrypted (non-compliant) Cardholder Data within documents, emails, databases, log files and a wide variety of other storage formats.

Our other Cardholder Data Discovery product, Enterprise Recon was discussed and demonstrated by Mohamed Zouine in Ground Labs’ second education session later in the day. Enterprise Recon is an Enteprise Cardholder Data Discovery solution designed to enable medium and large organisations the ability to identify all unencrypted cardholder data across an entire organisations network. In the event that unencrypted (non-compliant) cardholder data is identified, Enterprise Recon will isolate and display the findings within a centralised real-time reporting interface.
Both the education sessions and the leading presentation evoked great enthusiasm from the audience, with some describing our presentations and products as ‘extremely helpful for PCI-DSS Compliance’. A copy of this presentation can be requested by emailing enquiries (at) groundlabs dot com.

All in all, Ground Labs, once again concluded another successful PCI event, embracing the opportunity to meet key people from the industry to perceive their opinion and future vision on PCI compliance. All presentations were very useful and it was also great to meet delegates from previous PCI events and network with them. Other sponsors in attendance included AirTight, B2UNL, CSP, Foregenix, Fortinet, Protegrity, Safenet, Thales, Security Metrics, Sysnet, Tripwire, Fortytwo, 4tech software, Qualys, Verifone and Semafone.
Our appreciation goes to AKJ Associates for organising the day, we look forward to attending the next event in January which will be PCI London held on January 25 at the Victoria Park Plaza.