PCI regulations require companies to protect credit card numbers. But first you have to know where they are.

Here’s what I’ve learned from retailers and PCI auditors about step one of PCI compliance.

It’s simple to track credit card data from the point of sale to your databases and the bank that processes the transaction.

More challenging is uncovering the nooks and crannies it falls into throughout the organization.

Depending on your business processes, credit card data could be stored on customer service PCs, inside spreadsheets in the marketing department, or on backup tapes being shipped off-premises.

As I research an upcoming feature on PCI, I’ve been speaking with a number of retailers and PCI auditors. Here are a few tips you might find useful.

1. Self assessments. CIOs are conducting internal audits of their IT teams and business units to find out who touches credit card data and where they keep it.

It’s important to get this information from all the stakeholders, particularly business units that take customer orders or use card data to analyze buying trends.

2. 3rd-party audits. It’s often instructive to bring in outside experts to help you ferret out credit card data. One auditor told me about a major grocery chain that had made significant efforts to purge card data from systems that didn’t specifically need it.

However, when he bought a pack of gum with his credit card and then reviewed the logs of the point of sale system, he found it was recording the full card number and expiration date.

Of course, third-party audits are expensive, so you have to weigh the cost against the potential fines of PCI violation—along with the risk of a malicious party getting access to that data source.

3. Use tools. One retailer bought a data leak prevention product to make sure intellectual property and other sensitive data didn’t leave the network.

He also used its discovery feature to crawl his headquarters network and remote offices for repositories of card numbers. He used the findings to approach the business units holding the data to ensure they were following IT policies for encryption.

He also crawls the network regularly for rogue data or non-compliant business units. Which brings us to…

4. Get your processes in order. 99 percent of PCI compliance revolves around having IT and business processes in place to secure card data. You have to ensure that business units understand IT policies—and that they are following them.

You may also want to tweak business processes to minimize (or eliminate) the use of credit card data wherever possible. For instance, credit card numbers can be replaced with unique identifiers to analyze customer purchases.

Check out the Google tribute logo to the one of my favorite childhood toys, Lego bricks which is celebrating its 50th Birthday!

Taken from the official Lego website:

The 50th birthday of the LEGO brick is in January 2008 and there is plenty to celebrate. Children all over the world have played with LEGO bricks for the past 50 years, and LEGO is still right at the top of many wish lists, just as it always has been.

Industry and trade associations also recognize the LEGO success. Just before the turn of the millennium the LEGO brick was voted “Toy of the Century”, one of the highest awards in the toy industry, by both Fortune Magazine in the US and the British Association of Toy Retailers.

Legos are awesome! For those of you who missed it, check out my post about Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Lego.

Man, I could spend hours upon hours playing, building and just geeking out with my giant box-o-legos. I was fond of the little Lego people too.

My box of Lego bricks are long gone… first handed down to my younger brother, then later sold at various garage sales.

I think sometime this coming week I need to hit a local toy store and see about getting some Lego bricks for old time sake… maybe build myself a Lego laptop or robot?

Is it just a marketing veneer or is IBM really getting serious about integrating the social Web into its enterprise content management stack?

Yesterday, Big Blue released details on how its collaborative toolsets help companies prepare for Web 2.0 and previewed an integration between Lotus Quickr and its FileNet P8 ECM platform.

This is good news for FileNet clients as it appears their ECM repositories might get a Web 2.0 facelift, bringing better collaboration to often siloed islands of information.

Part of the foundation for its Web 2.0 strategy is Lotus Mashups, Web-based capabilities that make it easy for companies to assemble and publish mini-applications in real time.

And in true Big Blue style, IBM is ready to enter the building and take the business.

It has positioned Global Services to capture the projected demand for enterprise 2.0 solutions and social networking with the launch of specialized consulting services.

According to the release, it will focus on emerging technologies like social computing, SOA, and the 3-D Internet to improve business performance.

The U.S. government spends $7.5 billion to classify its information each year — that’s more taxpayer dollars than we annually put into the Department of Commerce.

But over-the-top secrecy policies aren’t just an expensive governmental habit. They give the President, the military and intelligence agencies powers far beyond what our founding fathers intended.

At least that’s the case made in Robb Moss and Peter Galison’s documentary Secrecy.

Though apparently too heady and subtle for the demands of the marketplace, it hasn’t caught on with Sundance buyers yet, however the film shines valuable light on a particularly troubling trend in American governance. Read the rest of this entry…

The Recording Industry of America’s (RIAA) website was attacked – again – over the weekend.

According to numerous breaking news stories it seems a lack of proper security controls enabled some to take parts of the site down, and tweak its pages. Get serious.

It looks like a plain vanilla SQL injection vulnerability was publicized on the social news network site Reddit, and the attacking escalated from there.

The RIAA.org Web site appears fully functioning now, but that probably won’t last too long if history is any indication. During the past five years the site has reportedly been defaced and has undergone several denial-of-service attacks.

Things got really sticky a few years ago when Senator Orin Hatch proposed to give the entertainment industry the right to attack systems used by illegal file swappers.

How about a search warrant?

Other than a laugh, these more recent hacks aren’t going to push their argument against the RIAA, its lawsuits, or the demise of DRM any further.

Energy would be better placed by hounding Congress to improve the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and boycotting the purchase of DRM enabled music files and CDs.

Speaking of DRMed music files, they’re already starting their fade into oblivion.

Nearly every, if not every, major record label is already starting to release DRM-free files. In fact, defacing Web sites is about as petty as trying to sue your customer-base to save a dying business model.

Speaking of petty: why won’t the RIAA spring for the occasional server assessment?

In recent months I’ve been taken over by a new found love for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. I’ve been digging through childhood boxes in storage and in my garage and came across my NES system.

I blew the dust off, gave it a nice wipe down, installed a new 72 pin connector and the thing runs like new. All my games work too. It’s like being back in the early 1980’s again.

So in my quest for Nintendo pirate treasure, I’ve also located both original NES controllers, the grey (the original) Zapper light gun and the rare Power Pad.

Everything works like it did back in 1985. Kick ass. Now that’s playing with power!

As an added bonus, I also have an Original Game Boy in almost mint condition, complete with box, Tetris, headphones and link cable. Basically how it was first released. Yeah, I’m a geek.

Over the weekend I plan on taking some pictures of my geektastic NES collection of gaming goodness and posting it for your viewing pleasure.

I’m also in the search for any original Nintendo “stuff” you might have and don’t want… it doesn’t matter what it is, just let me know as I might want it. Your trash could be treasure to me.

For those readers that are feeling in a “giving” mood, I’m accepting donations to my Nintendo addiction and more then willing to cover shipping fees and maybe a little extra for you depending on what you have.