World Vision UK protects donors' payment data from hackers

Charity opts for Stonesoft solution to achieve compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard

In its efforts to become PCI-DSS compliant, aid and development charity World Vision UK has implemented an intrusion prevention system (IPS) to protect donors' payment data.

The company opted for Stonesoft's StoneGate IPS, after consulting with partner companies and carrying out a month-long trial.

"We talked to a few partners and security companies, and two separate companies recommended the Stonesoft solution to us," Andrea Spurdle, head of business information and operations at World Vision UK, told Computing.

"That sparked our interest, particularly because the solution was not that well known in the market. Then we were impressed when we actually spoke to the company."

Spurdle added that the solution was easy to use and that the effort it made to avoid false positives was a key selling point for the charity.

"There are often stories following implemention of solutions like this whereby people end up spending a lot of time unblocking perfectly innocent traffic that the system has blocked; we wanted to avoid that," Spurdle added.

World Vision is one of the world's leading aid and development agencies, operating in 100 countries with funding from both voluntary and government sources. The UK arm of the charity funds and runs projects in 40 countries and employs over 230 people.