Open Access

Cybersecurity in Networks Supporting Card Payment Systems

https://doi.org/10.55640/ijnget-v03i02-03

PDF

Aghasi Gevorgyan ¹ ,

⁴ Head of Network Infrastructure, Armenian Card CJSC

Abstract

The article examines cybersecurity in networks supporting card payment systems, which serve as a distributed critical infrastructure characterized by high transaction volumes, dense data concentration, and escalating cyber threats. The study aims to conceptualize the payment card environment not merely as a set of isolated components, but as interdependent domains of trust through which a single transaction simultaneously traverses terminals, gateways, processors, schemes, and issuing and acquiring banks. The relevance is grounded in the structural dominance of card payments in retail and remote commerce, the documented growth of ransomware, data exfiltration, and DDoS campaigns against financial institutions, as well as the tightening regulatory focus on cardholder data protection and operational resilience. The novelty of the work lies in its tri-layered analytical design, which combines the architectural decomposition of the payment chain, a normative–taxonomic reading of PCI DSS concepts related to cardholder data, sensitive authentication data, and controlled environments, and a threat-oriented mapping of prevalent attack classes onto this architecture. This perspective enables the authors to demonstrate that excessive network connectivity and poorly defined trust boundaries simultaneously expand the formal scope of compliance and increase the number of lateral movement paths for attackers. The main conclusions emphasize the necessity of multi-layer, mutually constraining security controls, strict access and privilege management, cryptographic governance, environmental minimization, zero–trust–oriented segmentation, and response capabilities, where time to detection and recovery becomes the decisive parameter. The article will be particularly useful for payment system architects, banking cybersecurity practitioners, regulators, and researchers in the field of financial infrastructure resilience.

Keywords

cybersecurity, cardholder data environment, data breaches, payment card systems

References

Bruno, P., Jeenah, U., Gandhi, A., & Gancho, I. (2024, October 18). Global payments in 2024: Simpler interfaces, complex reality. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/global-payments-in-2024-simpler-interfaces-complex-reality

European Central Bank. (2025, January 30). Payment Statistics: First Half of 2024. European Central Bank. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/stats/paysec/html/ecb.pis2024h1~5263055ced.en.html

FinCEN. (2025, December 4). FinCEN Issues Financial Trend Analysis on Ransomware. FinCEN. https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-issues-financial-trend-analysis-ransomware

FS-ISAC. (2024). DDoS Attacks on Financial Services Industry Up 154%, According to New FS-ISAC/Akamai Report. FS-ISAC. https://www.fsisac.com/newsroom/pr-akamai-ddos-report-2024

Geçer, T., & Akgiray, V. (2025). Payment Card Systems. In The Financial Technology Revolution (pp. 63–89). Springer,Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-92048-6_4

Kuzior, A., Brożek, P., Kuzmenko, O., Yarovenko, H., & Vasilyeva, T. (2022). Countering Cybercrime Risks in Financial Institutions: Forecasting Information Trends. Journal of Risk and Financial Management, 15(12), 613. https://doi.org/10.3390/jrfm15120613

Lan, X., Xu, J., Zhang, Z., Chen, X., & Luo, Y. (2023). A systematic security analysis of the EMV protocol. Computer Standards & Interfaces, 84, 103700. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csi.2022.103700

Naqvi, B., Perova, K., Farooq, A., Makhdoom, I., Oyedeji, S., & Porras, J. (2023). Mitigation Strategies against the Phishing Attacks: A Systematic Literature Review. Computers & Security, 132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2023.103387

PCI. (2024). Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard Requirements and Testing Procedures Version 4.0.1. PCI. https://www.middlebury.edu/sites/default/files/2025-01/PCI-DSS-v4_0_1.pdf

Theocharidou, M., Lella, I., Naydenov, R., & Malatras, A. (2024). ENISA Threat Landscape for the finance sector. European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA). https://doi.org/10.2824/5410466

Most read articles by the same author(s)

<< < 1 2 3 4 5 > >>

International Journal of Next-Generation Engineering and Technology

Cybersecurity in Networks Supporting Card Payment Systems

Abstract

Keywords

References

Most read articles by the same author(s)

Similar Articles