Network security

California-based America's Christian Credit Union's efforts earned it a 2018 Best Practices Award.

Banks and credit unions — especially smaller ones — are being told to brace themselves for a wave of ATM raids by cybercrooks. Industry officials are uncertain what information the red alert is based on, but experts say swift, sophisticated thefts are very doable.

Banks — especially smaller ones — are being told to brace themselves for a wave of ATM raids by cybercrooks. Industry officials are uncertain what information the red alert is based on, but experts say swift, sophisticated thefts are very doable.

Mastercard has become the latest major card network to suffer a high profile crash. With its Thursday incident coming hard on the heels of Visa’s crash last month many experts wonder if blockchain technology could prevent future card network outages.

About a month after Visa's European outage, Mastercard encountered a similar glitch for a brief period of time on Thursday.

The Bank of England, together with the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority, has cautioned U.K. banks to prepare for cyberattacks and technical failures.

Hotels have elaborate systems to capture lodging fees and other purchases charged to rooms, but when customers book special events such as weddings or conferences, payment security can be more of a problem.

In the past few years of fighting against cyberattacks, security teams have developed "kill chain" models that document what steps the bad guys take to infiltrate a network and how to thwart them. The problem is, a significant number of data breaches occur from insider threats, which these models often overlook.

Visa, which was criticized for its vague explanation of a June 1 outage in Europe, was in the process of installing better technology, but the project was not complete at the time of the incident and won't be finished until the end of this year.

Retailer associations and debit network providers have formed the Secure Payments Partnership, designed to address the ongoing problem of payment fraud.

Visa's management faces an unwelcome choice: It can share more information about internal shortcomings or mistakes that caused payments to shut off temporarily, or get summoned to Parliament for a politically-infused public questioning.

Merchants, banks, fintechs and card networks may crave digital payments' treasure trove of data over cash's simple anonymity, but any weakness in a centralized ecosystem threatens the entire network, as Visa learned late last week.

It's too soon to tell whether a new button would replace Visa Checkout and Masterpass as brands. It's also unclear why consumers would choose another new payment option over the many options available today — such as PayPal.

Whether due to costs, growing cyber threats or other factors, a growing number of credit unions are outsourcing an important C-level security role.

Are the incentives for protecting card data so lopsided that merchants feel little need to do more? Or is it wrong to ask merchants to fix the faults in a payment card ecosystem they had little hand in creating?

A new cobranded Uber debit card from Green Dot’s GoBank unit gives drivers 3% cash back if they choose PIN entry when filling their tanks at ExxonMobil stations, affirming the persistence of PINs in an increasingly digital payments environment.

Japan’s financial regulator ordered further improvements at embattled cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck Inc. and penalized six others, including one operated by publicly listed GMO Internet Inc.

Payments security experts are warning of the risks to some merchants with payment systems that transmit cardholder data from the processor back to the point of sale from the Spectre and Meltdown computer chip flaws.

The recent explosion of activity around biometrics and other new forms of authentication should seem like a good thing for the development of connected commerce. But right now it's more of a wild west that needs to be tamed.

One of the indirect offshoots of Brexit is a government program that's designed to keep the U.K. relevant by lending a hand to new companies.
The program, FCA Innovate, may have a global effect by nurturing companies that aim to retire static authentication modes such as usernames and passwords.