If you've been following our PCI compliance series, you already know what type of PCI compliance your business needs and understand the 12 core requirements of PCI-DSS . Now, onto the more practical part: how do you actually implement and maintain these requirements at scale, especially when your engineering teams are pushing code multiple times a day?

And this can get really messy really fast as teams scale. The reality is that PCI-DSS Requirement 6 (Deploy and maintain secure systems and applications) isn't just any other requirement. It's the most dynamic and challenging requirement to maintain. While you can configure a firewall once and monitor it, your application code is constantly changing. Every commit, every dependency update, and every new feature potentially introduces vulnerabilities that could compromise cardholder data.

This is where modern AI-native Application Security (AppSec) tools, such as ZeroPath, become essential, not just for compliance, but for maintaining actual security in a fast-moving development environment.

Security at the Speed of Development

Traditionally, teams would do quarterly or annual checks. Companies would conduct a penetration test (pentest) to identify and flag all potential vulnerabilities. Security teams would then be assigned to patch those loose ends, and ultimately, everything would be secured and marked as PCI-DSS compliant.

That approach is fundamentally flawed, as code is being pushed to production every day. It's highly vulnerable for any company to wait until the next quarterly scan, especially when the code is going live on the same day.

Consider what PCI-DSS 4.0.1 actually requires for application security:

• Vulnerability identification and remediation within one month for critical issues
• Secure coding practices with code review. (Security practices for vibe coding )
• Protection against common vulnerabilities (OWASP Top 10 )
• Change control and separation of development/production environments
• Regular security testing, including both automated and manual reviews

Now multiply these requirements across dozens of repositories, hundreds of developers, and thousands of commits per month. Manual processes simply can't scale.

Security for PCI-DSS

Compliance becomes much easier when teams follow good engineering practices and incorporate security into the process from the outset. This mindset is known as the shifting left mindset, and many teams are beginning to shift left very early in their product development cycle.

Modern AI-native AppSec platforms, such as ZeroPath, address this by embedding security checks directly into the development workflow. Instead of finding vulnerabilities months after their introduction, ZeroPath catches them before they ever reach production.

AppSec Capabilities for PCI-DSS Requirements

Requirement 6.2: Protect Applications Against Known Vulnerabilities

Traditional SAST tools, such as Snyk and Semgrep, identify vulnerabilities through sophisticated pattern matching; however, they often overlook context-dependent issues that actually get exploited. An AI-native SAST tool like ZeroPath goes beyond just pattern matching. It understands your code base, identifying business logic flaws and authentication bypasses that couFld expose cardholder data. It uses LLMs to identify sinks and sources, tracing user input through your application to find exploitable paths. This means ZeroPath can detect:

• Business Logic Vulnerabilities: The Business Logic Scanner identifies flaws such as price manipulation in e-commerce systems, coupon exploitation, and workflow bypasses.

• Authentication/Authorization Issues: ZeroPath specifically identifies broken or missing authentication (authN) and authorization (authZ) issues. For payment systems, this means catching IDOR vulnerabilities where users could access other customers' payment information, or missing function-level access controls on payment APIs.

• Technical Vulnerabilities: Beyond business logic, ZeroPath detects SQLi, XSS, SSRF, and other OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities using its sink component, which uses AI to stay current with new vulnerability classes.

At some point, you might feel like there are too many AppSec solutions to choose from, and for that very reason, our security team has run benchmarks on the major AppSec providers . ZeroPath leads this industry with an 81.7% detection rate, more than twice that of Snyk, and a 19.9% false rate, almost half that of Semgrep.

Additionally, to meet this PCI-DSS requirement, ZeroPath supports over 20 languages (including C, C++, Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Ruby, Go, and more), providing comprehensive coverage across your payment processing stack, including templating engines such as Svelte and Embedded Ruby.

Also, if all of this information made you curious about how ZeroPath works under the hood, our security team has a step-by-step process for how ZeroPath is made from the ground up using LLMs.

Requirement 6.3: Develop Software Securely

PCI-DSS mandates secure coding practices and code reviews. Developers can meet this requirement easily with ZeroPath in multiple ways:

1. AI Pull Request Scanning

ZeroPath scans every PR in under 60 seconds, ensuring vulnerabilities never reach production. The scan includes:

• Vulnerability detection across your entire codebase
• Repository context analysis to understand how changes impact security
• Automatic patch generation for discovered issues

2. Natural Language Rules

Security teams love using ZeroPath because they can define custom policies without writing complex regex. This has become one of the most valuable features for developers. Teams have seen a significant boost in productivity and vulnerability findings since they no longer have to write regex and consider all possible edge cases. For PCI compliance, you might create rules like:

• Ensure no logging of credit card numbers
• Verify that all payment endpoints require authentication
• Prevent storage of CVV data in any form

3. Code Review Integration

ZeroPath integrates with the majority of industry-standard developer applications.

• GitHub
• GitLab
• Bitbucket
• Azure Pipelines
• CLI / Docker Support
• Code Upload

Other Integrations:

• Jira
• Linear
• Slack
• Email
• Webhooks
• SARIF, CSV exports
• API

In case of vulnerability detected in any of the PR or code scans, ZeroPath raises an issue or blocks the PR and assigns it to the developer who initially wrote that code, so that there is less need for manual management.

Requirement 6.4: Follow Change Control Processes

Teams confuse change control with proper documentation or detailed commit messages, but at its core, the goal is not to introduce vulnerabilities. ZeroPath customers navigate this by:

• Audit Logs: Logging every scan, finding, and remediation, providing the documentation required for PCI audits. Teams can export these logs and other reports and use them during their compliance audits as proof of security.

• Break Glass Access: For emergency deployments, authorized users can bypass failed security checks while maintaining full audit trails.

• Scan Cancellation and Logs: Gain complete visibility into all security scans, including who initiated them, what they found, and how they resolved those issues.

• Team/Organization-based ACLs: Granular access controls ensure separation of duties between development and production environments, with MSP support for managing multiple organizations.

Requirement 6.5: Address Common Vulnerabilities

ZeroPath's vulnerability detection addresses all major vulnerability classes required by PCI-DSS:

• Integrated SCA with Reachability Analysis : The platform not only lists vulnerable dependencies but also determines whether vulnerable code is actually reachable from user inputs. This eliminates false positives significantly and focuses remediation efforts on actual risks.

• Secret Detection : Automatically finds hardcoded API keys, passwords, and credentials that could compromise payment systems. ZeroPath tests these secrets and only raises an issue when those secrets are live and functional. So, if your team is using some test cases, you don't need to worry about the false positives.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Scanning : Ensures your cloud infrastructure configurations don't expose payment processing systems.

• Source-to-Sink Visibility : A full call graph of relationships shows exactly how user input can reach vulnerable code, which is essential for understanding complex payment flow vulnerabilities.

Requirement 8: Identify Users and Authenticate Access

You can meet more requirements than just the 6th with ZeroPath. It helps you ensure your authentication implementations are secure:

• Authentication Vulnerability Detection: ZeroPath specifically looks for broken authentication patterns, including:

  • Missing MFA implementations
  • Weak session management
  • JWT misconfigurations
  • Authentication bypass vulnerabilities

  ZeroPath is also the only AppSec solution that can detect authentication issues and business logic flaws.

Custom Authentication Policies: You can use natural language rules to enforce your specific authentication requirements, such as all admin endpoints must use multi-factor authentication.

Requirement 11.3: Perform External and Internal Vulnerability Scanning

By this point, you should understand why it's essential to perform continuous vulnerability scans rather than conducting them periodically.

• Scheduled Scans: In some cases, teams might still want a complete periodic scan for safekeeping, and for that case, they can configure automatic scans on your preferred schedule. Teams can enable Auto AppSec mode simultaneously with PR scans that take place with every code push.

• Permissiveness Levels: Adjust scanning sensitivity for different environments. You would ideally want stricter rules for production and more permissive rules for development.

• Intelligent Severity Scoring: Using CVSS 4.0, ZeroPath provides accurate severity ratings that help prioritize remediation efforts. ZeroPath evaluates every vulnerability and assigns it a confidence score based on its severity and exploitability, allowing teams to prioritize patches.

Requirement 12.8: Maintain Policies for Service Providers

For organizations acting as service providers, reporting and management become a priority, and to ease their workload, ZeroPath can:

• Reporting Capabilities: Generate repo, organization, or team-level analytics, including:

  • Mean time to remediation
  • Most common vulnerability classes by language and framework
  • Team performance metrics
  • Vulnerability trends over time

• SBOM Generation: Export Software Bill of Materials for transparency with your customers about your security posture.

• CWE Mapping: All vulnerabilities get mapped to the CWE standards for consistent reporting.

• Enterprise SSO Integration : Centralized authentication management ensures proper access control across all teams.

Conclusion

PCI-DSS compliance, especially the security aspect of it, doesn't really have to slow down development or require massive manual effort. You can choose one of the AppSec platforms to automate a lot of it, from security and logging to monitoring.

ZeroPath has helped numerous fintech and payment companies achieve PCI-DSS compliance. Using features such as the Business Logic Scanner, natural language rules, and automatic patch generation, you can ensure your payment systems remain secure without requiring active development hours and energy. The inbuilt language support, integrations, and detection capabilities make it an easy plug-and-play security and compliance solution.