4.25.18 Your morning briefing

Enjoy complimentary access to top ideas and insights — selected by our editors.

The information you need to start your day, from PaymentsSource and around the Web:

Hacking Amazon
Hackers attacked Amazon on Tuesday, redirecting traffic to rogue destinations and posing as a cryptocurrency website.

Ars Technica reports the attackers used a fake version of the MyEtherWallet site to steal digital coins, and also targeted Amazon's Route 53 cloud service. The attack hijacked about 1,300 IP addresses and involved the Border Gateway Protocol, which network operators use to exchange internet traffic.

A similar attack, reportedly of Russian origin, occured in April, resulting in traffic for Visa, Mastercard and Symantec to be rerouted. Amazon's cloud server has also been hacked in the past.

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

Not so fast
The Federal Reserve's faster payments ecosystem, driven by a Fed task force, also includes a group called the U.S. Faster Payments Council. That council just released a framework for its own structure and governance.

The Governance Framework Formation Team spent eight months developing the guidance, and is soliciting payments industry stakeholders to comment over the next two months before the council's guidance becomes final.

The release is the latest step in the Federal Reserve's strategy to expedite payment processing speed in the U.S. to accommodate e-commerce and mobile payments, an initiative that has been ongoing for much of the past five years.

From pens to clicks
While business payments remain largely paper-based in the U.S., in Indonesia B2B payments are still mostly hand-written and often result in failed cash flow tracking.

A startup called Paper.id is trying to reverse that by developing an invoicing platform that integrates with most banking and payment systems in the country.

Paper.id is collaborating with state-owned Bank Negara Indonesia to support a link between digital invoices, a QR code payment system Yap!, transfers, virtual accounts, credit cards, mobile banking and e-wallets to support transactions and tracking.

Mind the gap...between the phone and the turnstile
As the New York subway hopes to introduce contactless fares by 2020, the technology covers more than half of all London transit trips, reports the Evening Standard.

The payment method has been active on the Tube and rail services for four years, and is used for 17 million journeys per week.

It's also served as a gateway to mobile, as one in eight contactless trips are now made via a smartphone or another connected device.

From the Web

MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency from the creator of Signal, just raised $30M for mobile payments
TechCrunch | Tue April 24, 2018 - A new privacy-centric cryptocurrency project with some big names on board just raised a round worth noting. On Tuesday, the team at MobileCoin announced that Binance Labs, the major blockchain incubator associated with the Binance exchange, led a $30 million round denominated in bitcoin and ether for the new cryptocurrency. MobileCoin will enjoy “priority consideration” for being listed on Binance as part of the relationship.

Digit launches automated credit card debt payment service
VentureBeat | Tue April 24, 2018 - Personal finance bot Digit today launched a new automated service that helps customers reduce their credit card debt. Called Digit Pay, each day the service pulls money from your account, then automatically sends monthly payments to your credit card company. “Now our customers can sort of go live their lives, and Digit can be off in the background chipping away at their credit card debt for them automatically,” CEO Ethan Bloch told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

Facebook Has Hosted Stolen Identities and Social Security Numbers for Years
Motherboard | Tue April 24, 2018 - Cybercriminals have posted sensitive personal information, such as credit card and social security numbers, of dozens of people on Facebook and have advertised entire databases of private information on the social platform. Some of these posts have been left up on Facebook for years, and the internet giant only acted on these posts after we told it about them.

More from PaymentsSource

How AI can drill into data to prevent late payments
The U.K.’s late payments culture and its resulting impact on suppliers has many worrying about whether their clients are the next Carillion, a U.K. construction giant whose collapse left approximately 30,000 SMEs with millions of pounds in unpaid invoices.

Cryptocurrency issuers must improve their anti-money laundering game
When regulators recognize ICOs as securities offerings, they will likely require issuers to fully comply with standard Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations, increasing compliance pressure, according to Ron Teicher, CEO of EverCompliant.

Amazon's in-car deliveries have a whiff of desperation
Amazon's increasingly weird ideas for getting products to Prime customers — grocery delivery, in-home delivery and now in-car delivery — point to an unsettling conclusion: Amazon, for all its market dominance, is pushing the limits of who it can reach with traditional package delivery.

Nets pilots finger vein payments in Denmark school
Consumers enrolled in Denmark’s Dankort domestic payments scheme may sign up to make payments using only their finger in a pilot that the payments firm Nets is conducting in Copenhagen.