Nearly nine out of ten websites have significant security vulnerabilities, and most are completely unaware of the problem. That's according to the scanning statistics Trust Guard™ received after reviewing payment card industry (PCI) compliance scans of first-time clients' sites, according to a COMTEX press release.

Because all major credit card companies now require PCI compliant scanning, the widespread website vulnerabilities should be of particular concern to anyone running a business online.

A shocking 86.7 percent of all PCI scans of Trust Guard clients failed with one or more medium, high, or severe vulnerability, the company reported. Fortunately for those clients, the Trust Guard PCI compliance scan spotlighted their security holes, allowing the clients to resolve the issues, the press release says.

"I was shocked to see how many websites were not PCI compliant," Trust Guard co-founder and CEO David Brandley said. "Think of the millions of sites online. A vast majority of them, according to our scanning statistics, have serious vulnerabilities. It's dangerous, it's ultimately jeopardizing the site owners' businesses, and it's just unacceptable."

Trust Guard worked to find a way to educate website owners about the PCI compliance issues they very likely had while providing a service that would allow anyone to check his or her site for the more than 45,000 known website vulnerabilities, the press release says.

The result of the company’s efforts, FreePCIScanning.com, allows anyone to enter his or her name, e-mail and IP address for a free Approved Scanning Vendor (ASV)-certified PCI compliance scan. Users receive a full report showing all website vulnerabilities the service found, along with detailed instructions on how to fix them.