Using PAM to Meet PCI-DSS Requirements

More than a quarter of all cyberattacks still target financial systems — a figure that continues to climb with the growth of digital banking, fintech, and cryptocurrency platforms. In recent years, organizations such as ION Group, Bank of America, and several major exchanges have fallen victim to sophisticated breaches, underscoring that financial institutions remain high-value, low-risk targets for cybercriminals. With AI-driven phishing, deepfake fraud, and ransomware on the rise, there’s little sign these attacks will slow anytime soon.

Financial systems are attractive targets because of their high reward-to-risk ratio. Stolen card data, credentials, and personal information can be resold or weaponized within hours — while arrests of cybercriminals remain rare. The average cost of a data breach in the financial sector now exceeds $5.9 million (IBM 2024), and the reputational damage and customer churn often cost even more.

The complexity of today’s financial infrastructure compounds the problem: core banking platforms, ATMs, cloud services, APIs, and legacy mainframes all interact in near real time. Dozens of administrators and service accounts require elevated privileges to keep these systems running. Managing and securing those privileges is critical — especially as regulatory frameworks like PCI DSS 4.0, DORA, and NIS2 demand stronger, continuous controls for access and monitoring.

Fortunately, Privileged Access Management (PAM) has evolved to help organizations meet and even exceed these modern compliance expectations.

How Privileged Access Management addresses PCI DSS Requirements

• Requirement: Vendor-supplied defaults must not be used for system or admin passwords.
  A modern PAM solution enforces automatic credential rotation and rule-based password policies, ensuring that default credentials are never reused. Advanced tools also manage application-to-application passwords, SSH keys, and API tokens — closing gaps often overlooked by legacy systems.
• Requirement: Access to payment cardholder data is restricted to those with a business need to know.
  Cardholder data is privileged information. A robust PAM platform uses least-privilege and just-in-time access principles to grant access only when needed, verifying both user identity and context (such as device health or geolocation). This not only meets but surpasses PCI DSS 4.0’s stricter access-control requirements.
• Requirement: All access to network resources and cardholder data must be tracked and monitored.
  Comprehensive session recording and behavior analytics are now baseline features of leading PAM solutions. They provide full audit trails and can automatically flag or terminate suspicious sessions in real time — directly aligning with PCI DSS 4.0’s emphasis on continuous monitoring and proactive risk detection.
• Requirement: Secure remote access must be facilitated.
  With hybrid work and third-party vendors accessing systems remotely, PAM enables secure, brokered access without VPNs, controlling who connects, from where, and under what conditions. This ensures compliance with PCI DSS 4.0’s updated requirements for secure authentication, encryption, and visibility across distributed environments.

While PCI DSS 4.0 covers far more than PAM alone, implementing a comprehensive PAM strategy significantly advances compliance and overall security maturity. Modern PAM doesn’t just store passwords — it’s now part of an identity-centric, zero-trust architecture that uses AI-driven analytics, automation, and cloud-native scalability to protect the most sensitive systems on which financial trust depends.