Visa’s new security suite could protect the integrity of payment ecosystem by detecting fraud threats

Visa

Visa introduces protection against payment fraud (Credit: Pixabay)

Payments giant Visa has launched a new suite of security features to help prevent emerging and evolving threats targeted towards financial institutions and merchants.

Visa’s new payment security services, which could help protect the integrity of  its payments ecosystem by detecting and disrupting fraud threats, will be available to Visa clients at no additional cost or sign-up.

Visa payment system risk senior vice president RL Prasad said: “Cybercriminals attempt to bypass traditional defenses by stealing credentials, harvesting data, obtaining privileged access, and attacking trusted third-party supply chains.

“Visa’s new payment security capabilities combine payment and cyber intelligence, insights and learnings from breach investigations, and law enforcement engagement to help financial institutions and merchants solve the most critical security challenges.”

According to the payments company, its new security capabilities will offer a holistic protection to core components of the ecosystem, including people, data and infrastructure.

Visa has introduced four new features under the new security suite

It will help in maintaining trust and connecting the world through its secure digital payment network. Some of the features of Visa’s new suite include Vital Signs, Account Attack Intelligence, Payment Threats Lab and eCommerce Threat Disruption.

Vital Signs will actively monitor transactions and alert financial institutions of potential fraudulent activity at ATMs and merchants, indicating an ATM cashout attack.

To minimise losses for financial institutions, Visa will automatically or in coordination with its clients, step in and suspend the malicious activity.

Visa Account Attack Intelligence will apply deep learning to its processed card-not-present transactions to identify financial institutions and merchants that hackers could use to guess account numbers, expiration dates and security codes through automated testing.

The machine learning technology is claimed to detect such sophisticated enumeration patterns, eliminate false positives and alert affected financial institutions and merchants before fraudulent transactions could even begin.

Visa Payment Threats Lab will create an environment to test a client’s processing, business logic and configuration settings to identify errors that could lead to potential vulnerabilities.

Visa will be able to verify whether a financial institution is validating cryptograms, which are codes generated dynamically and unique to each transaction for EMV chip transactions.

The company’s eCommerce Threat Disruption is a solution that uses new technology and investigative techniques to scan the front-end of ecommerce websites for payments data and skimming malware.

The company stated that identifying such website compromises will reduce the amount of time malware could be present on a merchant website and can reduce exposure of customer and payment data.