As promised, I’m posting this as a follow-up to this year’s NRF show in NYC.  It is going to be a short post as there really isn’t a lot to talk about from the show, particularly in terms of security or compliance.
The big news this year is that the show didn’t suck.  Someone told me that it was the best attended show (by retailers) in the last 5 years.  I’m not sure if that’s an official ruling from the NRF, but I can certainly attest to the fact that traffic …

I haven’t posted anything forever!!!
Bad Alex!
Well, I’m heading out to another NRF this weekend and I promise that I’ll post something either from the show or shortly thereafter.  It might have something to do with how poorly security is represented at the show (other than at least 25 ‘Instant PCI’ offerings and Trustwave throwing money around…), but we’ll see.
If anyone out there is actually going to be at NRF and is interested in connecting, please let me know - alex.crittenden@yahoo.com - and we’ll figure something out.
Thanks and Happy New Year!
Related …

The Council is hosting a couple of ‘open mic’ webinars for industry stakeholders on the 8th and 9th of December.  They are trying to update the industry following the Community Meeting and get some feedback or questions….
These are typically reserved for Participating Organizations, but for this round they are opening it up to the broader industry…  Here’s the link:
PCI Council Webinar Release

This one has some significant implications for software security and the role & responsibility of technology vendors.  Here’s the link:
Radiant Systems and Computer World responsible for breach affecting restaurants – lawsuit
What’s most interesting to me in all of this is that fact that the restaurants seem to ‘get it’ - they understand the holistic impact of PCI on process, procedures, technology, etc. and, after being smacked around by the card brands for being the merchant where the breach occured, they have taken that holistic understanding and are working to hold …

OK - maybe not all of them, but the most common that I’m hearing anyway…
After asking you all to give me some questions for PA-DSS, I finally am getting around to posting up some answers.  Some of them are also taken directly from numerous conversations that I have had with software vendors over the last several months and, truthfully, I’m glad that I waited to put that post together…It’s not entirely retail focused, as PA-DSS crosses most industries, but I hope it proves useful in answering some common questions…
It’s located …

The links are a little messed up, so you might want to wait until about 10AM tomorrow to take a look, but, my newest NetSPI post is up.
Also, if you are interested in understanding a bit more about how PCI impacts industries outside of retail and hospitality or in looking through some more technical posts on penetration testing and the like, I’d tune into the NetSPI blog.  The team has really embraced blogging and collectively we are putting out a very good mix of posts (at least I think so.)
Although …

Just a reference to another NetSPI blog post that just went up…  link

This morning I had an interesting thought - I want to offer up something to anyone that is reading this blog and may have some questions regarding the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS.) 
This is an invitation to a ‘passive PA-DSS Q&A session’.  The reason I am calling this ‘passive’ is that this is not going to be a live session - if you have questions regarding the PA-DSS, what certain requirements mean, or how your particular situation affects it’s applicability to you, post it in the comments and …

Here’s a video of Seth Peter, NetSPI’s CTO, presenting to the Minnesota OWASP chapter’s annual half-day conference…

Seth Peter: The Developers Guide to PCI DSS and PA-DSS Requirements from David Bryan on Vimeo.

So my first post for the official NetSPI PCI blog is up there and, true to form, it’s not of a technical nature - merely an observation on how far the impact of PCI reaches.  One of the things that I talk about is how the retail and hospitality communities have gone through something very close to the grieving process in dealing with PCI - now organizations outside of retail and hospitality are starting this process - and it’s just as painful for them as it was for the retail …