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The organization charged with administering the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is trying to give merchants a compliance blueprint. The Prioritized Approach Tool offers six "milestones" that businesses should try to reach in their pursuit of compliance, said Lib de Veyra, the newly appointed chairman of the PCI Security Standards Council, which manages the guidelines. When faced with a standard as robust as PCI DSS, many companies, particularly the smaller merchants, need help deciding which risks they should address first, de Veyra told SCMagazineUS.com on Friday. The tool, to be published Tuesday on the council's website, also helps retailers and their acquiring banks demonstrate and measure progress. Rated by order of criticality, the milestones are: Limit data retention, secure the perimeter, secure applications, control system access, protect stored cardholder data and finalize remaining compliance efforts, ensuring all controls are in place. "You take care of Milestone One and you've significantly reduced the risk in the event of a data breach because, where's the data?" de Veyra said.

There were only two of us on the graveyard shift. "If it's not locked up," a colleague at my first newspaper declared as he snatched a folder of papers from our boss' desk and strode towards the office copying machine, "Xerox it." (Old-tongue for photocopy.) That was long before CDs, and USB drives and, certainly, iPods, but the lesson was the same. If you are stupid about protecting company information, shame on you. I guess that's the message behind the "revelation" released in a survey this week that the majority of people who leave their jobs, voluntarily or otherwise, are taking company information with them. Lots of it. My reaction was the same as when I watched my fellow journalist grab and copy whatever it was that had been so carelessly left in the open. I shrugged. (We are by nature an overly curious species, and that overrides our normally dominant ethics gene.) Data Loss Risks During Downsizing conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Symantec, was apparently designed to test the hypothesis that in this dire economy (ominous music in background), former employees are going to take important company information out the door. And, in fact, the poll of 945 former employees who left their jobs or were dismissed in the last 12 months showed that 59% stole company data. What kind of data? Email lists, non-financial business information and customer information, including contact lists. Not the secret formula for Coke, not the clinical trial reports on a cure for cancer, no insider information on proposed mergers and acquisitions. Not even a few thousand credit card numbers. Hardly worthy of shock and dismay. This is what a lot of people do when they leave jobs. Are they supposed to? No. Is it wrong? Yeah, but it's sort of like cheating on taxes. Folks rationalize it in a variety of ways, or it just doesn't weigh heavily enough on their conscience to set off an internal alarm. Most of the people who took data - 79% â