Mastercard Brings Cyber Protection Exercise to Europe

Mastercard has brought its Cyber Defense Exercise (CDX) to Europe for the first time.

As the company said in a Wednesday (Oct. 15) news release , the exercise pits two teams — a red team and blue team — against each other to test how organizations deal with “complex, coordinated cyber threats, both technically and strategically.”

The red teams take the offensive position, exciting things like supply-chain compromise and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, credential theft and data exfiltration, while blue teams work together to detect and respond to these threats.

At the same time, executives are managing “crisis governance, legal and regulatory engagement, and strategic communications to determine whether the cyber event remains an incident or becomes a public crisis,” the release added.

Mastercard notes that this is happening amid intensifying cyber threats against European businesses, with 25% of small businesses telling the company they’ve been targeted by scammers and a majority of consumers worried about cybersecurity risks.

“Cyber threats don’t respect borders or sectors. Our priority is working together with partners across Europe to respond when seconds matter- sharing intelligence faster, making smarter decisions and safeguarding people and businesses,” said Michael Lashlee, Mastercard’s chief security officer.

“CDX is about deepening collaboration, strengthening trust, and building resilience for Europe to stay protected.”

In other cybersecurity news, PYMNTS wrote recently about the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in this space, calling the technology both “the most sophisticated threat vector and the most effective defense.”

McKinsey research has found that organizations using AI-based detection reduce their threat-identification cycles by more than 60%, spotlighting how security operations are making the shift toward continuous monitoring.

An additional study from DXC Technology and Microsoft shows that while 90% of enterprises have adopted zero-trust frameworks, just 35% are using AI-driven detection.

“Average breach-response times remain about 42 hours, but AI-enabled pilots reduced that window to under five minutes,” PYMNTS noted.

Adoption is speeding up, with research by PYMNTS Intelligence finding that 55% of global companies have implemented AI-driven cyber protections . Sixty-eight percent of those firms saw improved detection accuracy, while 42% report faster incident response.

“Financial firms remain ahead of other industries: The World Economic Forum found that banks detect network anomalies in 38 minutes on average, compared with nearly four hours across other sectors,” the report continued.

Additional PYMNTS research shows that companies embedding AI into fraud and compliance monitoring see 22% fewer false positives and 30% lower compliance costs than companies that rely solely on manual review.