AI agents are running in production right now, autonomously calling APIs, querying databases, and triggering workflows. Most organizations have no idea what access those agents have or who approved it. This is the identity governance problem nobody is ready for.
PCI DSS v4.x wasn’t written with AI in mind, but the framework is more adaptable than it gets credit for. Here’s where the standard holds up, where there’s room to grow, and how the PCI SSC is already engaging with AI through initiatives like The AI Exchange.
After nearly 20 years of operation, the PCI Security Standards Council published its first annual report. It is a surprisingly revealing look at where payment security is headed, from product family restructuring and standards consolidation to AI guidance and global expansion.
AI agents are no longer chatbots. They call APIs, execute code, and make decisions with real consequences. The OWASP Agentic Top 10 is the first industry framework built to address this new attack surface, and the numbers behind it should concern every security professional.
When we talk about PCI DSS compliance, the conversation tends to stay clinical. Scoping exercises. Network diagrams. Encryption at rest. But compliance doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists because there’s a thriving, industrialized criminal economy on the other end waiting to monetize every gap you leave open.
Rapid7 published a detailed piece of research this month that every QSA, security engineer, and compliance leader should read: their analysis of the carding-as-a-service (CaaS) ecosystem and the underground dump shops that power it. Having spent years on the assessor side of PCI, I want to connect what Rapid7 found directly back to what it means for your cardholder data environment and your scoping decisions.
The FBI’s February 19, 2026 FLASH advisory (FLASH-20260219-001) documented something that should prompt a serious conversation in every bank, credit union, and fintech security team: over 700 ATM jackpotting incidents occurred in the United States in 2025 alone, resulting in more than $20 million in direct losses. Since 2020, roughly 1,900 incidents have been logged. The Department of Justice puts the total losses attributed to jackpotting since 2021 at approximately $40.7 million.
If you’ve spent any time on LinkedIn or at a cybersecurity conference in the last couple of years, you’ve seen the headlines. “Quantum computing will break all encryption.” “Your data is already at risk.” “The cryptographic apocalypse is coming.”
It makes for great conference talks and even better vendor marketing. But consider this: encryption has always been broken. And every single time, we’ve replaced it with something stronger. The lifecycle of cryptographic algorithms isn’t a flaw in the system; it is the system. So why would quantum computing be any different?
OpenClaw made remarkable security strides since my January article, hired dedicated security leadership, patched 40+ vulnerabilities, partnered with VirusTotal. Then ClawHavoc exposed 341 malicious skills. And now the founder just joined OpenAI. A breakdown of everything that changed, what still worries me, and how to think about deploying OpenClaw in this new reality.
A questions I hear often is: “How do we manage PCI Compliance for containers when they’re destroyed and recreated constantly?”
It’s a legitimate concern. In this post I write about file integrity monitoring when containerization is used (i.e. Docker, Kubernetes, etc) Traditional FIM tools were built for static servers that run for months or years. But containers? They live for minutes, hours, maybe days.
The PCI-DSS standard doesn’t give you a pass just because you’re using modern infrastructure. Requirement 11.5.2 still applies, you still need to detect unauthorized file modifications. The approach just looks completely different.
PCI-DSS 11.5.2 - Guidance and Full Technical Deep Dive # (On-Prem, Hybrid, and Native) # I remember sitting in my first PCI assessment years ago, watching a QSA flip through pages of documentation. When we got to Requirement 11.5.2, file integrity monitoring, the conversation hit a wall. The requirement seemed straightforward on paper, but translating it into a hybrid environment with on-prem servers, AWS workloads, and network appliances? That’s where the real work begins.