Visa Adds New Threat Detection to Prevent Payment Fraud

Visa announced the addition of new fraud threat detection and blocking tech designed to boost transaction security and, implicitly, the integrity of its payments ecosystem.

The company's new payment fraud prevention security capabilities make it possible for financial institutions and merchant clients using its global electronic payments network.

All the security capabilities announced today are immediately available to all Visa clients, with no sign-up requirements or any additional costs.

"Cybercriminals attempt to bypass traditional defenses by stealing credentials, harvesting data, obtaining privileged access, and attacking trusted third-party supply chains,” said RL Prasad, Visa Payment System Risk SVP.

New fraud detection capabilities

The new payment fraud detection tech Visa just added to its payments network is designed to protect its core components, namely the people, the data, and the infrastructure, to maintain the trust present at the center of all payment transactions.

Visa Vital Signs is the first of the four security additions and it is designed to constantly monitor all transactions throughout the network, automatically notifying "financial institutions of potential fraudulent activity at ATMs and merchants that may indicate an ATM cashout attack."

This new feature makes it possible for Visa to work in cooperation with its clients to quickly stop any malicious activity to minimize potential financial damages impacting partner financial institutions.

Visa Account Attack Intelligence uses deep learning to analyze the huge number of processed card-not-present transactions on Visa's database, to detect attackers' attempts to guess clients' account numbers, expiration dates, and security codes via automated testing.

The machine learning tech included with this new security feature "detects sophisticated enumeration patterns, eliminates false positives, and alerts affected financial institutions and merchants before fraudulent transactions begin."

Visa Payment Threats Lab allows the company to quickly set up a testing environment designed to examine any "client’s processing, business logic and configuration settings" to pinpoint any flaws that could lead to new attack vectors.

For instance, "[Visa] verify if a financial institution is effectively validating cryptograms—dynamically generated codes unique to each transaction—for EMV chip transactions."

Last but not least, Visa eCommerce Threat Disruption (eTD) is a new and proprietary software which scans the front-end of eCommerce websites in real-time to trace payment card data skimmer malware, with the online stores of all merchants which accept Visa cards being automatically included.

This enables the company to actively reduce the amount of time its eCommerce clients and their customers are exposed to payment data skimmers, as well as drastically decrease the number of transactions which would be otherwise compromised by malicious campaigns using card skimmer scripts.

All these newly added security capabilities to Visa' payments network are designed to complement the real-time Visa Threat Intelligence (VTI) platform designed to protect clients from cyberattacks targeting payment data.

"Visa’s new payment security capabilities combine payment and cyber intelligence, insights and learnings from breach investigations, and law enforcement engagement to help financial institutions and merchants solve the most critical security challenges," added Prasad.