Finished my second and last day of PCI (Payment Card Industry) training in Puerto Rico and “almost” become a Qualified Security Assessor (QSA). The training session ended with a short exam, the result of which will be announced in around within 2 weeks, and after which I will be be allowed to conduct PCI audits.

The PCI is a council formed by Visa, MasterCard, American Express, JCB and Discover and their basic function is to define and review security standards, so that the merchants and their service providers can secure their infrastructure to minimize the theft of credit card data.

The course contained both boring compliance stuff to really interesting things like what exact data is stored on the magnetic stripes of credit cards as well as how to mathematically compute the credit card number to validate it.

Here are few more pics I took today [actually tonight] at the old town of San Juan.

I experimented with my camera and took few pictures in darkness at around 9pm local time. It was so dark that the camera refused to take pics in auto-focus mode and the shutter got automatically set to be opened for a whole “FIFTEEN SECONDS”. I did not bring a tripod on this trip, therefore had to get these pics by putting the camera on ground and by using some quarters to adjust the angle of the camera.

Here are some pics of the beautiful old city of San Juan that I shot today evening after arriving at Puerto Rico.

The dark blue water in the background of first few pictures is Atlantic ocean. The cemetery on the shore reminded me the scene of my favorite movie Assassins, where Julianne Moore slips from hotel to attend a festival at a similar looking graveyard where the villain Antonio Banderas nearly misses her. I am not sure if the movie was shot here, but the spanish styled streets and cemetery looked quite similar to the movie.

[to view larger pictures, start by first clicking any picture and use the controls on picture to enlarge to browse through other pictures]

123►

Just got an email from isc2 telling me that I have passed my CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) exam. I took the exam on 19th May 2007 in London and it got email confirming my result on 5th June, around 16 days after the exam.