PCI Requirement 12.5.3 – Establish, Document, and Distribute Security Incident Response and Escalation Procedures to Ensure Timely and Effective Handling of All Situations

by Randy Bartels / July 3rd, 2018

Someone to Respond to Incidents

Incident response plans are crucial to PCI compliance. PCI Requirement 12.5.3 requires that you have an individual assigned to establish, document, and distribute security incident response and escalation procedures to ensure timely and effective handling of all situations. Without this role, incident response programs could be completely ineffective and security incidents could lead to great damage.

For this role, it’s important that organizations develop transition and/or succession plans to avoid potential gaps in this security assignment, which could result in responsibilities not being assigned and therefore not performed.

PCI Requirement 12.5.3 establishes the need to assign the roles and responsibilities around distributing your security incident response procedures and all of that relative training. Your assessor is going to be looking for who that role has been assigned to.