Data security

As the digital age reduces the wear on physical cards, how is it that some consumers are requesting new cards more frequently?

Large banks like Wells Fargo have started using "cyber ranges" and "red teams" to respond to real cyberattacks on virtual versions of their real systems.

When breaches occur it is the standard practice for the notification to come directly from the company affected. The difference with Discover's service is that, because it's an opt-in program, its users may already be bracing themselves for bad news.

UniCredit, Italy's No. 1 bank, said hackers took biographical and loan data from 400,000 client accounts in one of the biggest breaches of European banking security this year.

The bank is drawing renewed scrutiny after a lawyer’s unauthorized release of sensitive client details for tens of thousands of accounts belonging to wealthy customers of its brokerage unit.

Cyberattacks are on the rise, but that doesn't mean becoming a victim is inevitable. The right preventative measures and best practices can help secure digital assets and customer data, writes Robert Fifield, co-founder of Payably.

Because of the opaque nature of internet retailing and widely publicized data breaches, security concerns remain a pervasive gating factor to digital commerce. Key to countering this is providing consumers with the tools to monitor and control where their payment credentials are stored online.

Credit card or personal data transactions getting processed through IBM equipment will soon benefit from "one-click" data encryption in a powerful new mainframe.

The system can run more than 12 billion encrypted transactions per day and can automatically keep applications, cloud services and databases hashed.

Some merchants, issuers and processors are concerned that the card brands will tout their "ownership" of payment card prefixes as a basis for requesting that mobile transactions on their cards be routed to their networks and screened through tokenization services they provide.