Data security

Top executives from Bank of America, U.S. Bancorp, American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Microsoft and Apple are expected to participate as part of a White House summit on cybersecurity issues in California on Friday.

This week's White House Summit on cybersecurity at Stanford University comes at a pivotal time for payment and security professionals, who have an opportunity to cooperate to fight Internet crime.

As e-commerce continues to grow, so does the business potential for fraudsters. And many common security measures aren't enough to solve the problem.

Mobile banking apps that allow consumers to proactively lock their debit cards, or limit their cards' use to specific scenarios, could shift the way banks manage fraud and even enable them to place some of the liability on the consumer.

Top executives from Bank of America, U.S. Bancorp, American Express, MasterCard, Microsoft and Apple are expected to participate as part of a White House summit on cybersecurity issues in California on Friday.

The central bank is floating the concept of using the Internet to facilitate the direct clearing of transactions between financial institutions, which would likely diminish its own role in the U.S. payment system.

Encryption has become a political hot potato for the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council as it compiles a list of validated encryption vendors and services — and leaves off some companies that say they deserve to be recognized as secure.

This week's White House Summit on cyber security at Stanford University comes at a pivotal time for payment and security professionals, which have an opportunity to cooperate to fight Internet crime.

The creation of a new cybersecurity agency is the latest move by the Obama administration to combat the increasing threat of cyberattacks.

Hackers in several financial services industry data breaches targeted customer-contact information that is often thought of as less sensitive. But crooks can use that data and other bits of stolen info to do great harm.

U.S. gas stations can wait until October 2017 to begin accepting EMV-chip cards or face the consequence of an increase in fraud liability, but there's already concern that the work at gas pumps could stall.

The New Jersey Assembly is weighing whether to pursue legislation that would make the state a haven for digital currency businesses.

Stephen Platt, regulatory investigations consultant and author of "Criminal Capital: How the Finance Industry Facilitates Crime," explains his misgivings about the idea of a shared know-your-customer registry for the industry.

Deployments of biometrics are usually fairly challenging, but Apple has demonstrated through its Touch ID fingerprint system that it can scale a consumer biometric technology quickly. London-based ValidSoft predicts it can do the same for voice biometrics by using the microphone built into most consumer gadgets.

Efforts to apply biometric security to payments have reached the fraud-prone remittance market, as Touch ID takes hold for both incumbents such as Western Union and upstarts such as Xoom.

Acquirers are being encouraged to alert merchants to a new remote malware attack called "Ghost" that allows hackers to take over a network.

The U.K. is rapidly becoming a target for payment crime, with malware on the rise and the country poised for fraud spikes as crooks abandon EMV-protected terminals to target the more vulnerable e-commerce channel.

Apple's mobile wallet has been out for just four months, and already it has shaken up the way mobile payments operate at the point of sale. It has faced pushback from some merchants and banks, but it has also popularized new forms of security and other payment technology.

While Visa and MasterCard aren't yet applying the same level of pressure for tokenization security as they are for EMV-chip cards, the card networks' CEOs are clear that this technology is their new expectation for e-commerce.

Federal Reserve officials suggested that anonymous payments and the technologies powering digital currencies could inform broader plans for reshaping the U.S. payment system.