Month: March 2017

The SAQ Bs and how they apply to you

pci-compliance

We always say SAQ As and Ds get all the glory and attention.

This is because a majority of our SAQ clients are e-commerce companies and therefore they apply SAQ A or A-EP depending on where their credit card information is collected.

However, recent times, we have been working on a well-known retailer and were told that SAQ D would be the one that applies to us. Now the SAQ was passed to them by the bank and the bank insisted that they do SAQ D-Mer.

Now this post is going to assume that you have some working knowledge on what SAQ’s are in PCI-DSS world. Self Assessment Questionnaires are one of the most misunderstood concepts in PCI. They are like Donald Trump’s foreign policy and the plot of Interstellar all mashed into one misunderstood mess. Often because acquirers find it so hard to understand, they just tell all their merchants that they should go for SAQ D.

Now we have fought for our clients before – where we overturned the acquirer insistence for one of our e-commerce clients to do an SAQ D-Mer, and instead got them to agree that an SAQ A-EP is sufficient. SAQ A-EP = around 140 questions. SAQ D-Mer = around 320 questions. Big difference.

Why is this important? We firmly believed in the concept of overdoing PCI is not a good thing. Why? Because our clients have other things to do and limited time and money to do these. Ideally, sure, everyone should go on Level 1 Certification. But the reason why the PCI Council created a whole bunch of ‘levels’ and then types of SAQs is simply because different businesses face different risks. It doesn’t make sense for a neighbourhood grocery that accepts 10 cards a month to implement the same million dollar controls as, say, Tesco or Exxon Mobil. So. Don’t overdo things, but don’t under-do it as well.

Back to SAQ Bs. So with this client, after talking to them a few rounds we found out that:

a) Their credit card terminals are separate and not integrated with their POS machines and connected via USB.

b) The POS machines are all connected back to the branch switch (let’s call it branch switch) and from there connects back to corporate HQ for reconciliation purposes

c) However – we found out that the Credit Card terminals have their own connectivity to their own ethernet switch (lets call it Credit Card switch) that connects to an ISDN router and directly to the bank.

This means, there are two flows – once the credit card is used on the Credit Card terminal, the card information is sent out directly via ISDN to the bank. Whatever approval etc that comes back, it will go through the USB to update the POS.

The crunch here is that NO CREDIT CARD information is ever sent back to the client’s environment. Everything is out through the bank environment – as the Credit Card Switch all belongs to the bank. It’s only located on the customer premise but the customer has no access to it – physical or logical.

So begin our argument with the acquirer, to overturn their SAQ D to SAQ B or B-IP. Let’s look at SAQ B criteria as per PCI document:

a) Your company uses only an imprint machine and/or uses only standalone, dial-out terminals (connected via a phone line to your processor) to take your customers’ payment card information;

Seems like it. Technically, the question here is whether a credit card terminal connected to a POS machine with USB is considered ‘standalone’. Our argument here is yes, as long as no credit card info flows through that USB connection and only approval/decline/transaction dollar amounts etc. Remember the USB connection connects the terminal to to the POS machine (a Windows box). Credit card info flows out the other way, directly to the bank via a circuit switched technology like ISDN (i.e dial out). For the millenials, ISDN used to be the granddaddy of broadband. If you have ever gone through internet connectivity era with normal dial up 14.4kbps, ISDN is like what God would send to us out of mercy and grace.

b) The standalone, dial-out terminals are not connected to any other systems within your environment;

Again, the argument here is ‘connected’. What does this mean? Is it through IP means, or even an RS232 connectivity is considered connected? Our reasoning is that this is USB connection and no card data flows through this ‘connection’ and we will use this reasoning once we get on the table with the acquirer.

c) The standalone, dial-out terminals are not connected to the Internet;

No they aren’t. They are on ISDN direct to the acquirer.

d) Your company does not transmit cardholder data over a network (either an internal network or the Internet);

No they don’t. In fact, no credit card info is stored, processed or transmitted anywhere in the customer environment. Except for the physical protection over the bank equipments residing on customer premise.

e) Any cardholder data your company retains is on paper (for example, printed reports or receipts), and these documents are not received electronically; and

They do have some credit card info on paper which they need to protect, but these are manual forms they need to fill out for refund process. And the process is dictated by the bank.

f) Your company does not store cardholder data in electronic format.

No, of course not.

So you see, except for the tiny word ‘connected’ in question b), our client does meet all the SAQ B criteria. It’s really ridiculous to have someone go through the entire SAQ D when they do not have card holder data in the environment they control. And what if they have 80 branches, each with 10 POS terminals and servers? That would mean 800 systems in all branches come into scope for pentest, internal scans etc? No wonder I hear some retailers using PCI as a cuss word these days.

So, we don’t know how this is sorted out yet, but we will soon, and perhaps that will constitute another post. For now, if you need any help with your PCI-DSS – SAQ or Level 1 certification, drop us an email at pcidss@pkfmalaysia.com.

Cheers for now!

PCI and Multi Processing Environments

PCI

Since our last post, we have received some queries from other companies asking us about their PCI compliance. Just to be clear, we do not charge a fee for replying to your email and assisting you make sense of this compliance. We know how frustrating it is, and no, anyone that tells you that PCI is easy as 1-2-3 isn’t really letting you know the full picture. This is because some emails had been – “I have this question, but wait, if you are going to respond and charge me a fee, then don’t bother.” What are we, mercenaries? Yes we are a company requiring profits and not an NGO, but over the 7 years we have been involved in PCI, we have actually done a fair bit of advisory without charge, just to get PCI awareness out there into the market.

So, to save the trouble, I’ll put up a public post here to sort some of the questions out. This question, we have been getting a fair bit: What if the company has a multiple processing environment? What does this mean?

Let’s say, a retailer. It has a POS environment whereby they run standalone terminals connecting to the bank for purchases in their store. Credit card is used here – card present transactions. Then they launch their e-commerce site, which redirects all card non-present transactions to a PCI certified payment gateway, where the card collection page is hosted by the gateway.

You see here – there are two different channels for credit card interaction. The traditional POS, and the e-commerce site. Both are completely outsourced – one is direct dial up to the bank, the other to the payment gateway. So how do you deal with this?

You have two options – one is to do separate SAQs for both environments. Yes, you can. In the example above, doing an SAQ B for your POS environment and an SAQ A for your ecommerce environment (assuming you are level 3 or 4 merchant) should be able to suffice. The second option is to combine these channels into one SAQ. Once you do that however, you won’t be able to go through the ‘specialised’ SAQs. Specialised SAQs are like A, A-EP, B, B-IP, C, C-VT – meaning they have conditions in which you need to adhere to in order to use them. For instance for A, it says that this will only apply to merchants with card non-present business. And likewise for B, it has condition that you do not store card information electronically and is not applicable to e-commerce merchants. So when you don’t fall into any of these SAQ buckets, you end up with SAQ D-MER, which basically covers everything in PCI. But don’t worry, you a lot of the SAQ would be non-applicable in this case, and only those related to outsourced e-commerce and POS facilities would apply.

Now another related question, and one that I ended up having a 2 hour discussion with a client on = can an entity be both merchant and service provider?

The short answer is yes, you can.

An example would be a telco. Telcos generally have massive merchant business. They accept payments for their pre-paid, post-paid etc from end customers through e-commerce, POS channels etc. But the Telco could also support a manage services and hosting environment whereby other merchants are hosting their payment sites on. Then, now you have a service provider environment.

Or, it could even be within the same organisation, you have your merchant business of a payment portal, Mobile POS, or mobile app, connecting to an outsourced payment gateway. Suddenly you decide you want to set up your own payment gateway and channel all the transactions of your merchant business to your own payment gateway.

In the first instance, if you have separate environments and businesses isolated from each other – you can again opt for separate compliance. You could be a Level 3 Merchant filling up an SAQ B form, and also a Level 1 Service Provider doing an ROC with a QSA.

In the second example where your merchant business connects to your own payment gateway, it’s a little more complicated because in all likelihood, the systems utilised by both business would be common. In this case, isolation and demarcation of type of business is more difficult to attain. Assuming you are eligible for Level 2 service provider, you can technically fill that up and ensure that it includes your payment channels within that SAQ. If you are doing a Level 1, then similarly, the QSA would likely include your payment channels (previously what you would call your merchant business) into your service provider certification efforts. Otherwise, you can still opt for a separate PCI compliance program, whereby you fulfill your merchant compliance, and for your service provider compliance program you do it separately.

For the latter option, the advantage is that if you launch your payment gateway and you provide options for other companies (not just your own) to connect to you, your compliance isn’t dependent on your payment channels (your merchant business). You would treat your own payment channels as just another merchant out of many, that are connecting to you. The downside of this is that you would likely need a clear demarcation and separation of systems between your merchant and service provider business.

Again, there are many ways to skin PCI. The best way (on paper at least) is to get your acquirer on the table or your payment service provider to ask them what is applicable to your business. Unfortunately, around 99% of the time in this region, the acquirers aren’t too knowledgeable themselves and either give wrong information or just tell our clients to do a Level 1 Certification with a QSA.

As part of our job scope – we will assess our client’s environment and provide the options on the table, and in some cases even be present on the table in the discussion with their acquirer – to obtain a clear indication on how to move forward and what PCI options are acceptable.

As always, drop us a note at pcidss@pkfmalaysia.com and we will do our best to accommodate your inquiries!

PCI-DSS Logging in MySQL Community Version with MariaDB Plugin

pci-compliance

PCI-DSS is a standard that brings to mind the famous sayings of Jimmy Dugan, the coach of an all-girls baseball team in the movie A League of their own (Played by Tom Hanks):

“It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.”

Well, at least the first part. Whether the banter of it making it ‘great’ is a different story. Most PCI-DSS sufferers will add the word ‘pain’ after the word ‘great’. And, one of the main pains for PCI-DSS is logging and monitoring. That’s requirement 10 for you. So much so that PCI-DSS recently released a document specifically addressing this issue here. So you will be faced with myriads of issues – from the simple to the hard: no we cannot centralise log anything, we do not have logging function in our application, we do not know how to do daily monitoring of our logs, we do not know what to log or how to log, we are all running on DEC VAX from 1974. So many reasons.

One of the challenge we recently faced with the client was that they were using MySQL community version. The challenge was how they can log administrator actions and security INSERTS, UPDATES etc in mysql community version? Logging is totally available in Enterprise, but not the free one – or at least not in its limited form.

Enter Maria-DB Plugin. Now before we go into semantics, MariaDB is an opensource database created by guys who created MySQL. It’s a fork, because MySQL was acquired by Oracle some time back and everyone was afraid that Larry Ellison might gobble MySQL up the way Galactus ate planets. The cutest story here is that MySQL was named after the founder’s daughter – My. And yes, MariaDB is named after his other daughter! But the first daughter’s name is “My”…so it’s like, “Yeah, this is My, My Daughter.”

Anyway. So what we are talking about here is not for them to install MariaDB, but to use it’s ‘plugin’ for MySQL. Make sure the QSA doesn’t get confused on this because ours did and we entered into the twilight zone of communications for a while where nothing made sense.

The Advantages of using MARIA DB AUDIT PLUGINS are:

So this article, we are going to explain on how we install the plugins in MySQL version 5.6.35 that is based on CentOS 7.

  1. Download the latest plugin from the links given above and you should see the download directory as below. Choose the latest version. We used server_audit-1.4.0.tar.gz. in centOS. We can use the wget command that is:
    wget https://downloads.mariadb.com/Audit-Plugin/MariaDB-Audit-Plugin/server_audit-1.4.0.tar.gz
  2. Extract the tar file by using the command
    tar -xvzf <file name>
  3.  Login into MySQL and locate the Plugin Directory of MY SQL using the command below
    SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES LIKE 'plugin_dir';
  4. Copy the plugin to plugin directory in MySQL based on your linux server (64 bit/32 bit).
    • cp server_audit-1.4.0/linux-x86-64/server_audit.so /usr/lib64/mysql/plugin/
    • chown -R mysql.mysql /usr/lib64/mysql/plugin/server_audit.so

     

  5. Install the MariaDB Audit Plugin into the MySQL Server by this command inside MySQL
    • INSTALL PLUGIN ‘plugin name’ SONAME ‘filename.so’;
  6. Once Installation is complete, we’ll start the daemon with the following command in the command line:
    sudo systemctl start mariadb
  7. The command systemctl doesn’t display the outcome of all service management commands, so to be sure we succeed, we’ll use the following command:
    sudo systemctl status mariadb

    If MariaDB has successfully started, the output should contain “Active: active (running)”

  8. Next, let's take a moment to ensure that MariaDB starts at boot, using the systemctl enable command, which will create the necessary symlinks: sudo systemctl enable mariadb
  9. Next, we’ll turn our attention in configuring the syslog FormatSet the Type of Action that will be log (within MySQL)
  • Connect: connecting and disconnecting to/from the server will be added to the log. An unsuccessful connect will be logged as a failed connect including the error code.
  • Query: full statement including the values will be logged
  • Table: Any operation on a table triggered by query will result in an event the MariaDB Audit Plugin can catch to log it directly
SET GLOBAL server_audit_events='CONNECT, QUERY,TABLE';

You need to have root privilege to be able to change the Audit Plugin variables.  With this changed we are ready to enable the auditing, which we now will do by using the following command within MySQL:

SET GLOBAL server_audit_logging=ON;

The full set of variables is found on this page: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/server_audit-system-variables/

To make the changes to the configuration of the MariaDB Audit Plugin permanent, we now need to add these settings to my.cnf. This ensures that the same configuration will be used after server restart.

Under [mysqld] in my.cnf, add in

server_audit_events=CONNECT, QUERY, TABLE
server_audit_logging=On

There you go, now your MySQL is ready to face the scrutiny of the QSAs in your PCI-DSS compliance program!

Email us at avantedge@pkfmalaysia.com for any enquiries regarding this plugin or PCI-DSS in general and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

Alienvault Troubleshooting: The Missing Sensor

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USM Sensor not displayed properly at “AlienVault Center” of the USM Server

We have recently been involved in a few deployments of Alienvault. Aside from the All In Ones, we have had a few projects where separate sensor, loggers and servers were deployed, as well as even deploying USM Anywhere, Alienvault’s new flagship cloud centric product that literally makes Alienvault USM works – well – anywhere.

While the USM Anywhere deserves its own piece of article, in this short article we will explore the often seen problem we call: The Case of the Missing Sensor.

So, you have setup the standard server and sensor properly and as per the deployment guide that you find here. The configuration was well configured and the sensor peacefully connects to the USM Server. So you break open the celebratory glasses and start relaxing. You let your customer go through the whole features, absolutely confident that they will be impressed with everything you have done so far and they will be signing off the implementation sheet, and you will be paid and you will ….

“Hold on. Where is the sensor?”

Startled, you look at the screen and even though you have configured the server IP address in the sensor, you do not see any sensor under the Server’s Alienvault Center section. This makes it look like the sensor wasn’t  deployed but in fact all has been configured and accepted. If it didn’t show under AlienVault Center, you won’t be able to manage and update the sensor properly. Plus, it makes it look like you sold them a sensor but then ran away without actually installing one. Which makes you a charlatan. Which isn’t good.

So, you try the well tested “alienvault-reconfig” and cross your fingers. Do it on both server and sensor. No luck.

If you hit a brick wall on this, one method around it is to add the sensor manually into the server.  The below is the command used to fix it:

To add sensor into Server

#alienvault-api add_system --system-ip=[sensor's ip] --password=[sensor's root password]

Once you run the command, that doggone sensor should show up properly under the AlienVault Center and you look like a king in front of your customer. However, like all CLI commands, you need to make sure that if this is done on production, proper backup and proper due diligence has been done.

There is not much detail found but there is similar issue found at the Alienvault forum and the thread is a couple years old.

AlienVault Forum: https://www.alienvault.com/forums/discussion/1322/adding-sensors-to-the-alienvault-centre-display

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