Heartland Payment System, again PCI compliant means safe?

Last week it was announced that the U.S. largest payments processor Heartland Payment System which suffered a tremendous data breach and thus went out of public favor was reinstated to Visa Inc.'s list of service providers deemed compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

The announcement comes after Heartland reported on Friday that the company’s annual assessment for compliance with the PCI standard was successful. Earlier in March the payment processor was dropped from the list of PCI compliant financial institutions following an investigation into the massive data security breach announced by Heartland in January.

Termination of PCI compliance initiated by Visa caused a great number of merchants to doubt if they can still continue to use Heartland without being penalized for noncompliance themselves as long as they know that Visa requires all organizations that accept credit card and debit card payments issued under its name to work only with processing providers which were approved by PCI council.

Visa issued a letter which advised merchants that they could further use services of Heartland but the fears remained. With the announcement that Heartland was again accepted as a PCI compliant member will likely remove any uncertainties and concerns.

Nevertheless, as it was already noted many times PCI compliance means nothing when it comes to real data protection. It cannot guarantee the payment processor will never fall prey to another cyber attack. It is the efforts of the company itself that can ensure high level of customers’ information security.