Headlines:
Network Started to Prevent Phishing Pay By Touch Sues BioPay over Patents Oracle, Unisys Work on Payment Software
Network Started to Prevent Phishing
Visa U.S.A. Inc., Microsoft Corp., eBay Inc., and WholeSecurity Inc. have started the Phish Report Network.
Participants send lists of confirmed phishing sites to a database that can be used to prevent customers from accessing the fraud sites.
"Our job is to basically get as much information as possible into the database," said Brad Nightengale, Visa U.S.A.'s head of emerging products.
It costs $15,000 to participate in the network, but Visa members will get a 50% discount if they sign up by May 15, Mr. Nightengale said. "The game plan here is to grow the network," he said.
WholeSecurity, an Austin software vendor whose clients include Earthlink Inc., announced the network Monday. WholeSecurity will maintain the database.
The network plans to build on existing technology. For instance, the eBay toolbar, a Web browser add-on, includes WholeSecurity software that prevents customers from entering account information when they visit a site that eBay knows is counterfeit. (eBay's payments subsidiary, PayPal Inc., is also in the Phish Report Network.)
Phishers send e-mails that purport to be from a bank, card company, or e-business. They try to lure people to impostor Web sites and try to steal their passwords and account information.
Mr. Nightengale said Visa has hired Nameprotect Inc. of Madison, Wis., to find phishing sites that appear to be using Visa's brand.
"We confirm those sites very quickly as phishing attacks," he said. "Most of them are very obvious."
MasterCard International of Purchase, N.Y., also uses Nameprotect to detect phishing sites that use its brand.
Pay By Touch Sues BioPay over Patents
Pay By Touch Networks Inc. announced Tuesday that it is suing a rival biometric point of sale payment authorization technology vendor, BioPay LLC, for patent violation.
Pay By Touch owns 25 patents and has more than a dozen patent applications pending; BioPay has no patents but has 29 applications pending.
On Jan. 18, Pay By Touch won a patent for using biometrics to authorize check cashing. BioPay had offered a similar service since November 1999.
The day Pay By Touch won that patent, BioPay filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for Delaware asking that that patent and others be invalidated or that a ruling declare that BioPay does not infringe on them. (The new suit was filed in the same venue.)
Pay By Touch, of San Francisco, said that before filing the lawsuit it had not used its patents to make legal threats against its rivals, though it had warned BioPay in writing last year about the potential for future infringement. BioPay is based in Herndon, Va.
Oracle, Unisys Work on Payment Software
Oracle Corp. and Unisys Corp. are developing a payments product that they say will be able to house data from all of a bank's business lines.
Unisys, of Blue Bell, Pa., will adapt its Payment Information Engine to work with Oracle's 10g database software.
Andrea Klein, a vice president for financial services industry marketing at Oracle, of Redwood Shores, Calif., said the typical bank gets 40% of its revenue from payments, but 30%-35% of its technology expenses are for the support of payments systems.
Her goal is to create a single payments system that can track transactions made anywhere at the bank, which she said would significantly reduce the cost of managing all these payments.
"A payment is a payment, regardless of which product it is for," Ms. Klein said.
Gary Cawthorne, a vice president and a managing partner at Unisys' global banking practice, agreed. "Customers don't care what silo their payment information is going through," he said.
He said the Payment Information Engine can be used by banks of any size but that the Oracle version is more likely to be used by large ones at first.
Ms. Klein said Oracle is in sales discussions with about six major banks and that she expects to complete a deal by May. The product could be in production at some banks by summer, she said.
