Visa And FireEye Team Up To Prevent Payment Breaches

Visa and FireEye have set their sights on helping merchants and issuers better protect themselves from payments breaches. And to do so, the companies announced their plans yesterday (June 3) to develop tools and services that will enable those two key groups to do so.

Visa and FireEye’s new cyber watch program is aimed at providing protection capabilities for merchants — regardless of size — the companies said in a joint news release. By enabling them to defend themselves against advanced cyber attacks, Visa and FireEye have created a Community Threat Intelligence program to help companies recognize threat information. This program will also allow merchants and issuers to detect and respond to breaches quicker. Most importantly, breaches that may attack their IT and payment infrastructure.

“The threat environment for merchants is more hostile than we’ve ever seen – attack groups focused exclusively on stealing consumer data are continuously expanding their operations and employing new techniques – it’s a daunting prospect for any merchant whose business could collapse if they lose customer trust,” said David DeWalt, CEO of FireEye. “This new collaboration brings together two industry leaders to help protect merchants and payment data and minimize the impact of attacks by sharing information.”

As part of this new program, FireEye will operate the Web-based service that’s designed to enhance stakeholders’ knowledge of cyber attacks that could be infiltrating their systems. FireEye will also be able to provide a much needed upgrade in terms of how threat intelligence data is shared in the industry, which has typically been via email or static documents. By partnering in this initiative, FireEye and Visa plan to offer tools to combat cyber intelligence threats, as well as provide a resource to monitor those threats. This includes using FireEye’s cyber forensics group Mandiant to offer more capabilities designed for issuers and merchants of all sizes.

As any security expert knows, identifying data compromises earlier means lessening the chance for accounts to be compromised. By providing enhanced monitoring for cyber attacks, it also can help alert merchants quicker of suspicious payment activity in order to reduce the scope of the potential breach.

“By combining Visa’s unparalleled view into global payments and FireEye’s industry-leading cyber security expertise, we intend to bring faster, actionable intelligence directly to players across the payments system,” said Charlie Scharf, CEO of Visa. “Although we are leading efforts to render stolen data useless through smart technologies, data security remains foundational for merchants. We’re pleased to be working closely with FireEye, which has been at the front lines identifying and investigating some of the most significant compromises around the world, to provide critical cyber intelligence to merchants and financial institutions.”

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