Mastercard announced the launch of Mastercard Threat Intelligence at Money20/20 USA, marking the introduction of its first threat intelligence offering designed for payments at scale. This solution integrates Mastercard’s fraud insights and global network visibility with curated cyber threat intelligence from Recorded Future’s platform, aiming to assist payment fraud and merchant compliance teams at issuing and acquiring banks in proactively detecting, preventing, and responding to cyber-enabled fraud.
Fraud frequently originates from cyberattacks rather than at the transaction point. Reports indicate that 60% of global fraud leaders are informed of cyber breaches only after fraud losses have begun. Recognizing that payment fraud represents a cybersecurity challenge with direct financial implications for organizations, Mastercard Threat Intelligence seeks to facilitate collaboration between fraud and security teams to mitigate fraud before it occurs.
Johan Gerber, global head of Security Solutions at Mastercard, stated, “As the lines between cybercrime and financial crime continue to blur, innovation is an imperative. Mastercard Threat Intelligence provides customers with actionable, real-time and targeted risk insights to disrupt fraudulent transactions, inform strategic defense and ultimately enable a more proactive approach.”
Key features of Mastercard Threat Intelligence include real-time alerts and proactive declines for card testing detection, digital skimming intelligence with quantitative data to assess impacts and disrupt card-related malware, merchant threat intelligence for risk assessment and faster incident response, weekly reports on emerging threats across the payment ecosystem, and payment intelligence reports offering case studies and fraud trend analysis to strengthen defenses.
This launch follows less than a year after Mastercard’s acquisition of Recorded Future, underscoring a commitment to a unified, intelligence-led strategy for securing the digital economy.
Tracy (Kitten) Goldberg, director of Cybersecurity at Javelin Strategy & Research, commented on the development, stating that effective cybersecurity will increasingly rely on cross-sector and regional threat intelligence. She added that vendors with extensive transactional data and analytics will be crucial in enhancing information-sharing among financial services, merchants, and the broader industry. Goldberg also noted that “New doors are opening for advanced threat intel, facilitated through successful cyber fusion that incorporates a myriad of tools across identity verification, fraud detection, and indicators of compromise. Feeding threat intel across disparate teams and industries in meaningful and useful ways will help fraud and cybersecurity teams more readily identify trends, placing them in positions to move from reactive response to proactive mitigation.”
During market testing over six months, threat intelligence data supported Mastercard’s ecosystem partners in identifying and neutralizing malicious domains responsible for payment card data theft. These domains affected nearly 9,500 e-commerce sites and were linked to an estimated $120 million in fraud.
Irvin Salinas Pineda, a fraud expert at Banco Mercantil del Norte, stated, “Mastercard Threat Intelligence will help us to keep the pace with main threats and trends, something that is not possible today due to high-demanding operations in the bank.”
Mastercard Threat Intelligence is now available globally for issuers and acquirers.
