Visa Adds New Fraud Disruption Measures

Visa now is adding fraud disruption to supplement its transaction fraud detection and remediation efforts. The company today at the Visa US Security Summit 2019 in San Francisco outlined five new capabilities it now uses to prevent fraudulent transactions.

"We're looking to identify and disrupt fraud before it happens," says David Capezza, senior director of payment fraud disruption at Visa. "We want to take a more proactive approach and identify these attacks and shut them down before they occur."

Rivka Gewirtz Little, research director for global payment strategies at IDC, says Visa's new approach blends both its cyber and fraud units.

"Typically, organizations are focused on the transaction," Gewirtz Little says. "What's interesting here is that Visa is creating a true cyber fraud system where the cyber team and fraud teams are integrated: the cyber team focuses on the attack against the enterprise and the fraud team looks at ways of preventing the attack. It's not always the same set of tools, the same team and objectives."

The five new fraud capabilities Visa will offer include:

Vital Signs: Monitors transactions and alerts financial institutions of potentially fraudulent activity at ATMs and merchants that may indicate an ATM cashout attack. To limit financial losses for financial institutions, Visa can automatically or in coordination with clients, step in to suspend malicious activity.

Capezza says Visa looks to understand the methodologies behind ATM cashout attacks, looking for anomalies in withdrawals and then notifying clients.

Account Attack Intelligence: Applies deep learning to Visa's vast number of processed card-not-present transactions to identify financial institutions and merchants that hackers may exploit to guess account numbers, expiration dates, and security codes. By using machine learning, Visa looks to detect sophisticated enumeration patterns, eliminate false positives, and alert affected financial institutions and merchants before follow-on fraud transactions begin.

Payment Threats Lab: Visa will create an environment to test a client's processing, business logic, and configuration settings to identify errors leading to potential vulnerabilities. Capezza says working directly with clients, Visa can run red-team tests to walk through the methodologies hackers use to launch attacks. They can replicate how various attacks occur to understand them better and look out for new ways hackers can potentially attack financial systems.

eCommerce Threat Disruption: Capezza says the success of EMV cards has shifted cybercriminals' focus to ecommerce merchants. Visa's threat disruption capability uses sophisticated investigative techniques to scan the front-end of e-commerce websites for payment data skimming malware. By identifying potential website compromises, Visa hopes to limit the amount of time malware might be present on a merchant website and significantly reduce exposure of customer and payment data.

Payment Threat Intelligence: All of Visa's new disruption capabilities will enhance Visa's threat intelligence reports, which go out to Visa's brick-and-mortar and online clients and the broader financial community. The reports include alerts, analysis, technical indicators, and mitigations for potential cybercrime threats, account compromises and fraud.

Meanwhile, Forrester Research today published a new fraud study commissioned by Visa. According to the new Forrester report, 68% of respondents expressed concerns about fraud in mobile banking payments; 60% for mobile wallets; and 58% for peer-to-peer payments. However, Forrester also found that 77% are ready to invest to meet these challenges head-on.

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