There is an old story about a chicken and eagle. I hear this story being told by life coaches or motivational trainers trying to get through to our thick, jaded, technical skull that there is something more to life than coding and technology.

The abbreviated version is this: A farmer was walking and finds an eagle’s egg fallen out of the nest. He picks it up, brings it back to his farm, and puts it into the chicken coop. Soon, it hatches, and joins the other chickens in the farm and learns how to be a chicken, even though its an eagle. So this is where some of the version diverges.

a) The chicken and the eagle starts talking one day and the eagle notices another eagle flying high in the sky and he goes, “Dang, I wish I could be an eagle,” and his chicken-pal looks at him scornfully and says, “You are a chicken. How can you be like the king of all birds, soaring through the sky?” So the eagle keeps thinking he is a chicken and the next day he gets roasted for dinner. And the farmer finds his meat a bit tough and doesn’t taste like chicken at all. The moral here is: Don’t let your limitations inhibit you or you will end up a cooked and eaten. This is probably the original version before the other two came along below:

b) The farmer is visited by a naturalist who observes this ‘chicken’ and immediately knows he is an eagle. So he takes this chicken up to a high cliff, and throws him over, shouting: “Spread your wings and fly! Soar like the eagle you are meant to be!” And the eagle soars through the clouds and sky and become the king of all birds. The moral of the story: All of us are eagles, even if you think you are a chicken. All you need is a life coach or a motivational trainer to throw you off the ledge and you will soar. This is the preferred version for life coaches and motivational speakers. For obvious reason.

c) Same as story b) above, but instead of soaring, the naturalist throws the ‘chicken’ off the ledge, and it falls 100 feet and splatters its brains all over the bottom of the ledge and dies since it doesn’t know how to fly. And gets cooked and roasted for dinner. The moral of the story (and this is by far, our more preferred, realistic and risk-averse version): Don’t do something you may be destined for but not ready for. Or you will end up smashed, cooked and eaten.

All three versions have this theme in common: The eagle isn’t a chicken and the chicken isn’t an eagle. The chicken may have commonalities of an eagle, like wings and a beak, but just because it has those doesn’t make it an eagle.


Yes, I am aware that the anecdote above isn’t a very good illustration of the point I am trying to make, but I couldn’t think of a better one. And in a roundabout way, what I want to illustrate here is that ASV scans do not make you PCI Compliant.

We get this a lot.

A company would come and say they are PCI-compliant. Or we have a client who outsources certain portion of their operations to another company and that company comes back and shows us their ASV compliant scan and says this is all they need to show us. We (The auditors/consultants) are compelled to accept this because the ASV scans demonstrate their PCI Compliance, they say.

Let’s make a point here: ASV questions and subquestions in the SAQ D covers around 14 queries. Out of around 600. That means ASV covers 2.33% of PCI-DSS. There is a massive load of other controls and items covering PCI-DSS Other than those precious ASV quarterly scans. What about your patching? Hardening? Firewall security? HR policies? Logging and monitoring? Logical access? MFA? Hardening of systems? Anti-virus and host firewalls? What about service provider management? What about vendor default passwords? What about storage, encryption, key management? Software development? Application and penetration testing? Internal vulnerability scans? Training?

You can see how impossible it is to accept just the ASV report as an evidence of PCI compliance, much like how we cannot accept the chicken as an eagle, but yet, we are constantly berated upon that we don’t know what we are doing and that their Banks have accepted their ASV scans as a sign of PCI compliance, so we should to. But we can’t. We can’t accept 2.33% as a 100% of something. It’s simply mathematically not possible.

So there you go – banks. Why do banks perpetuate this myth that PCI compliance = ASV scans? Why? It’s 2.33% of PCI-DSS! You can’t accept something as an eagle just because it has wings and a beak! There’s really no argument about it.

Here is what 2.3% feels like:

a) The number of Jazz music of all US Music sales in 2013

b) Increase in slot machine spending in New Zealand in 2018 Q1

c) Auto parts industry against the US GDP in 2013

d) Android 6.0 Marshmallow installation for all Android devices in July 2016

e) Thats lesser than the % of freshwater we have on this planet (2.5% of water on the planet is freshwater)

I am sure there’s a lot of 2.33% out there on this planet, but the point we are making is this: It’s not compliance. It’s a small but important part of compliance but it’s not compliance. So no matter what your banks tell you, we can never accept the ASV scan as a sign of PCI compliance. It can be accepted as one of the evidences of PCI compliance amongst many, but not as an evidence of complete compliance.

Now, stop calling a chicken an eagle. Let us know about your questions for PCI or any compliance at pcidss@pkfmalaysia.com.