In 2005, high-profile credit card
and credit data loss and compromise became so common- place that the Washington Post dubbed it “the year of the data breach.†Long before that rash of events, however, Visa had developed the first major commercial standard for protection of cardholder data. Created in 2001, Visa’s Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP, also known as AIS (Account Information Security) internationally) defined a standard for securing Visa cardholder data for U.S. customers, wherever that data was located.