Mastercard (NYSE: MA) has recently announced Mastercard Threat Intelligence, the threat intelligence offering applied to payments at scale. The solution brings together Mastercard’s fraud insights and network visibility with curated cyber threat intelligence from Recorded Future‘s platform to help payment fraud and merchant compliance teams at issuing and acquiring banks “proactively detect, prevent and respond to cyber-enabled fraud.”
Fraud seldom begins at the actual point of transaction – it usually tends to originate as a cyberattack. Sixty percent of fraud leaders report that they are “notified of cyber breaches only after fraud losses begin.” Payment fraud is no longer just a financial issue for fraud teams — it’s a cybersecurity challenge “that directly impacts an organization’s bottom line.”
Mastercard Threat Intelligence bridges communication gaps, “enabling fraud and security teams to work together seamlessly to stop fraud before it happens.”
Key features of Mastercard Threat Intelligence include:
- Card testing detection: Real-time alerts and proactive declines of fraudulent test transactions, reducing downstream fraud and safeguarding cardholders
- Digital skimming intelligence: Quantitative data to help customers assess skimmer impacts and disrupt card-related malware, tapping into Mastercard’s ongoing work with industry partners to protect the payment ecosystem
- Merchant threat intelligence: Targeted payment fraud insights and high-level payment threat intelligence to assess merchant risk and enable faster incident response
- Payment ecosystem threat intelligence: Weekly reports detailing emerging threats and vulnerabilities across the broader payments landscape
- Payment intelligence reports: Actionable case studies and fraud trend analysis to inform strategy and strengthen defenses
The launch of Mastercard Threat Intelligence comes about a year after Mastercard finalized its acquisition of Recorded Future, and demonstrates the companies’ commitment to delivering “a unified, intelligence-led approach to securing the digital economy.”
Threat intelligence data has now reportedly helped Mastercard’s ecosystem partners identify and take down various malicious domains that had allegedly been responsible for the theft of payment card data.
Since the market testing process began and over the course of 6 months, these malicious domains had reportedly impacted “nearly 9,500 e-commerce sites and were linked to an estimated $120 million in fraud.”
