Quasar Scan Benefits & Strengths
Since 2010, our Quasar team has been developing a highly accurate system for specifically finding credit card data, identifying areas of risk, reducing compliance scope, and supporting effective data management practices. Quasar Scan is now packed full of benefits and strengths, and can help you easily achieve PCI DSS compliance and protect you and your customers.
Quasar Scan Benefits
Connect to your chosen scanning targets, and Quasar Scan goes to work looking through all of your different file types and locations. Quasar Scan excels at automatically and manually filtering out non-credit card data to find actual cardholder data, and our proprietary weighted scoring easily reduces false positives.
The ability to scan a wide range of data sources, and the all-in-one installation of both the server and viewer, makes it easy and fast to get started with your first scan and then scale. Quasar Scan also aggregates data searches from practically any file format or database structure. This allows you to generate results on your entire environment and to locate cardholder data, no matter where it is.
Searching through all of your files can throw up a lot of potential cardholder data, with things like phone numbers and other account numbers looking very similar to credit cards. This can leave even a skilled professional with endless pages of hits to painstakingly trawl through. But Quasar Scan uses expert inbuilt scoring and filtering systems to reduce false positives. You can also create and save customisable manual filter sets to spotlight specific information when reviewing your results, and speed up your scanning.
Connect to your chosen scanning targets, and Quasar Scan goes to work looking through all of your different file types and locations. Quasar Scan excels at automatically and manually filtering out non-credit card data to find actual cardholder data, and our proprietary weighted scoring easily reduces false positives.
The ability to scan a wide range of data sources, and the all-in-one installation of both the server and viewer, makes it easy and fast to get started with your first scan and then scale. Quasar Scan also aggregates data searches from practically any file format or database structure. This allows you to generate results on your entire environment and to locate cardholder data, no matter where it is.
Searching through all of your files can throw up a lot of potential cardholder data, with things like phone numbers and other account numbers looking very similar to credit cards. This can leave even a skilled professional with endless pages of hits to painstakingly trawl through. But Quasar Scan uses expert inbuilt scoring and filtering systems to reduce false positives. You can also create and save customisable manual filter sets to spotlight specific information when reviewing your results, and speed up your scanning.
Deliver consistent and trusted results to quickly and easily contain your scope. When an assessment is looming, instead of having to unnecessarily audit your entire operation Quasar Scan will first set perimeters by ‘ring-fencing’ the at-risk computers and limiting the scope for assessment – saving you money and stressful disruption.
Be prepared for future assessments, make informed decisions, and avoid major disruptions and fines that come with not being PCI DSS compliant or experiencing a data breach. Quasar Scan can make a huge difference for your wider Governance, Risk, and Compliance framework. It is also lightweight and has a low load on your system, and is designed to scale up to suit your enterprise’s capacities.
When you’re going to be assessed, why pay a skilled technician to painstakingly search through your entire systems when you can access a cost-effective and powerful tool like Quasar Scan? Staying on top of your data also provides ongoing assurance that you are not storing any card data, to lessen the chance of experiencing business disruption and huge fines.
Deliver consistent and trusted results to quickly and easily contain your scope. When an assessment is looming, instead of having to unnecessarily audit your entire operation Quasar Scan will first set perimeters by ‘ring-fencing’ the at-risk computers and limiting the scope for assessment – saving you money and stressful disruption.
Be prepared for future assessments, make informed decisions, and avoid major disruptions and fines that come with not being PCI DSS compliant or experiencing a data breach. Quasar Scan can make a huge difference for your wider Governance, Risk, and Compliance framework. It is also lightweight and has a low load on your system, and is designed to scale up to suit your enterprise’s capacities.
When you’re going to be assessed, why pay a skilled technician to painstakingly search through your entire systems when you can access a cost-effective and powerful tool like Quasar Scan? Staying on top of your data also provides ongoing assurance that you are not storing any card data, to lessen the chance of experiencing business disruption and huge fines.
Whether you are PCI DSS compliant or not, all organisations can benefit from better understanding their systems for handling their card data. Establish, test, and refine your data management systems, to lay the foundation for effective data management practices. There are no opinions here – just black and white facts! Quasar Scan will give you clarity about what credit card data you are holding, real insight about your processes, and confidence that you are PCI compliant and therefore have a lower risk of data breach.
We’ve seen first-hand how people store credit card details in all sorts of weird configurations and places. We’ve even found users who have saved card details in odd ways purely to get around the safeguards an organisation has in place! Quasar Scan can help you see the processes in place, and check that your staff are following the rules. Armed with this information you can make informed decisions, such as providing further training, refining your processes, or deleting unnecessary data. Running Quasar Scan will help you keep on top of your PCI compliance obligations, and ensure your processes are robust, especially as your enterprise’s hardware, software, and people change.
Quasar Scan’s reporting features provide information that will help your analysts determine where the largest compliance issues are. For example, if you want to know which users or computers have the most cardholder data hits, Quasar Scan will tell you. This allows you to spend your time focusing on the actions you need to take next, to ensure data security and compliance requirements are met – rather than spending masses of time and money figuring out where the cardholder information actually is!
Whether you are PCI DSS compliant or not, all organisations can benefit from better understanding their systems for handling their card data. Establish, test, and refine your data management systems, to lay the foundation for effective data management practices. There are no opinions here – just black and white facts! Quasar Scan will give you clarity about what credit card data you are holding, real insight about your processes, and confidence that you are PCI compliant and therefore have a lower risk of data breach.
We’ve seen first-hand how people store credit card details in all sorts of weird configurations and places. We’ve even found users who have saved card details in odd ways purely to get around the safeguards an organisation has in place! Quasar Scan can help you see the processes in place, and check that your staff are following the rules. Armed with this information you can make informed decisions, such as providing further training, refining your processes, or deleting unnecessary data. Running Quasar Scan will help you keep on top of your PCI compliance obligations, and ensure your processes are robust, especially as your enterprise’s hardware, software, and people change.
Quasar Scan’s reporting features provide information that will help your analysts determine where the largest compliance issues are. For example, if you want to know which users or computers have the most cardholder data hits, Quasar Scan will tell you. This allows you to spend your time focusing on the actions you need to take next, to ensure data security and compliance requirements are met – rather than spending masses of time and money figuring out where the cardholder information actually is!
Consider the true cost of having your data breached. Firstly, you are charged per the amount of card numbers, so the bigger the breach, the bigger the fine. Imagine being fined, for example, $100,000USD while you are noncompliant! But not only do you risk fines, each piece of cardholder data represents one of your valuable customers whose entire financial position could be damaged because they chose to spend money with you. The fines, high costs of becoming compliant, and damage to your public reputation means your business may not even be able to continue operating.
Eliminate the fear of the unknown. Find your at-risk cardholder data now!
Consider the true cost of having your data breached. Firstly, you are charged per the amount of card numbers, so the bigger the breach, the bigger the fine. Imagine being fined, for example, $100,000USD while you are noncompliant! But not only do you risk fines, each piece of cardholder data represents one of your valuable customers whose entire financial position could be damaged because they chose to spend money with you. The fines, high costs of becoming compliant, and damage to your public reputation means your business may not even be able to continue operating.
Quasar Scan strengths
Safe scaling
Problem: Immense data load vs maintaining compliance
Understandably, the large scale enterprises we’ve worked with over the years are often initially concerned about the load that scans can create on their systems. They don’t want to slow their servers down, and disrupt their business or organisation’s performance. But this can create a tension between the stakeholders and admins who are responsible for your productivity, and project managers who are responsible for your systems – especially when an assessment, and potentially costly fines, are fast approaching.
Our Solution:
Quasar Scan’s flexible scanning options lets you balance the need to remain PCI DSS compliant with allowing you to carry on with business as usual. You can choose to break up your scans and add to them linearly, allowing it to scale up in a way that maximises your organisation’s specific capacity and completes your scan as quickly as possible, without sacrificing performance. All the while, your teams can watch scan progress and view results through their Quasar Scan dashboard. This keeps all parties within your organisation happy!
Go wide then filter
Problem: Blind spots, guesswork, and opinions
The low-quality scanners on the market have cut corners, and will carry out a ‘one-size-fits all’ scan. They will often ignore “unlikely data” through initial broad filtering and using guesswork, for example making up rules like “Only look in columns with the keyword ‘credit card’”. This half-hearted approach will not only miss genuine credit card or personal data, it will also return many false positives – particularly as the cardholder industry changes. They will then spit out a confusing report that leaves you without clear direction or confidence – or requires a ton more manual labour to sort through, unnecessarily draining time and money from your business.
Our Solution:
Quasar Scan takes a fundamentally different approach. Through over a decade of development, real-world testing, and refining, we’ve taken the guesswork out to miss less real data and reduce false positives. Quasar Scan looks at absolutely everything in your chosen systems and then takes it all through a robust proprietary filtering process – using both automated and manual filtering to find more of your ‘toxic waste’. We OTOH cast a very wide and comprehensive net first, seeing all raw data and doing minimal pre-filtering. Then, one of our experienced analysts can be available to examine the data and feed new patterns and filters into your scan engine to speed up and improve future scans. We call this our Card Scanning as a Service (CSaaS) model.
Just the right product
Problem: Quality vs cost
Cheaply built scanners will return pages of false positives because they have cut corners, and leave you no better off, whereas other really good scanners are eye-wateringly expensive which can make them unsustainable.
Our Solution:
We’ve developed Quasar Scan to bring you the best of both worlds, combining cost-effectiveness with quality. Quasar Scan’s objective is to provide you with the product you need, to make a real difference for your business or organisation.
Cutting-edge coverage
Cardholder data is always evolving, so our committed team is always at the forefront of adapting to the new kinds of card numbers and changes in the industry, for example 19- digit cards, and longer BINs.
We make sure our product stays cutting edge, to have much less chance of new risks flying under the radar and provide the best tool possible for protecting your business or organisation.
less chance of new risks flying under the radar
Scanning databases
As well as supporting the usual files, servers, workstations and NAS’, we also have mature database scanning features that are “database- first” aware of the different structure and needs of how databases work.
All the way from MS SQL and Oracle through OSS DBs like PG and Mysql/Maria to NoSQL stores like MongoDB.
designed with scanning features that are “database- first”
Quasar Scan FAQ
Through over a decade of development, real-world testing, and refining, we understand the issues businesses and organisations of all sizes face when it comes to achieving PCI DSS compliance. Quasar Scan has been built to offer you a better way to create simple and sustainable compliance, reduce your risk, and protect your enterprise and your customers
User Guide
When you download Quasar Scan, the all-in-one installation of both the server and viewer makes it easy and fast to get started with your first scan.
You’ll also find detailed support in our User Guide, to connect and scale at pace.