One of our readers recently emailed me with a major dilemma. They need to keep their website PCI compliant in order to keep using their payment gateway to process credit card transactions. Their PCI scanner is telling them they have vulnerabilities, while their hosting provider tells them they are fine. Meanwhile our reader is caught in the middle, paying fines.

I don’t dare to use my business e-mail address, because it would disclose my business name. I have been battling with my website host and security vendor concerning the Non-PCI Compliance of my website. It is actually my host’s IP address that is being scanned and for several months it has had ONE Critical and at least SIX High Risk scan results. This has caused my Payment Gateway provider to start penalizing me $XXXX per month for Non-PCI compliance. I wonder how long they will even keep me. When I contact my host, they say their system is in compliance. My security vendor is saying they are not. They are each saying I have to resolve the problem, although I am in the middle. Is there not a review board that can resolve this issue? I can’t do anything with my host’s system, and don’t know enough gibberish to even interpret the scan results. I have just been sending them to my host for the last several months.

There is no way that this could be the first or last time this has happened, or will happen, to someone in this situation. This sort of thing is bound to come up in compliance situations where the customer doesn’t own the underlying infrastructure, whether it’s a traditional hosted offering, and ASP, or the cloud. How do you recommend the reader – or anyone else stuck in this situation – should proceed? How would you manage being stuck between two rocks and a hard place?

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