Fraud & Security

With a major chip card standard bearing down on U.S. merchants, acquirers, and issuers, small merchants in particular could face tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in annual fraud losses they are currently protected from, a processor executive argues. Patty Walters, senior vice president for merchant products and …

Global Payments Inc. still expects it could spend about $120 million as a result of the data breach it reported in early March, but new information from the company gives a glimpse of just where that money is going. The big merchant processor, however, didn’t give any new details in …

Most owners of legitimate sites that have been compromised to support phishing attacks have no idea their site has been violated until some third party tells them, according to a recent survey. But the cluelessness doesn’t end there. Nearly half of owners of compromised sites don’t know how the attack …

Even though merchants accepting mobile payments are in the minority and mobile-payment volume is low, losses from fraud incidents for those merchants are higher than for non-mobile-accepting merchants, according to the fourth annual “LexisNexis True Cost of Fraud” study sponsored by content provider LexisNexis Risk Solutions and conducted by Javelin …

Continuing its slow march toward comprehensive security requirements for mobile payments, the PCI Security Standards Council on Thursday released a set of best practices for developers of software for mobile devices. The guidelines follow by four months the guidance about mobile payments that the Council released for small merchants. The …

Point-to-point encryption of card data has been a hot sell for merchant processors and vendors of security technology ever since the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) took effect in 2006 and especially after a spate of high-profile data breaches at merchants and processors not long afterward. Visa Inc., the …

For electronic currency provider Bitcoin, 2012 is proving to be a problematic year. In March, a well-known Bitcoin trading platform, Bitcoinica, announced a security breach in which hackers stole 43,554 Bitcoins. In May, a Federal Bureau of Investigation report warned that criminals could use Bitcoin for illicit purposes. And later …

The data breach Global Payments Inc. reported earlier this year could cost the merchant processor nearly $120 million, company executives revealed Thursday. The expenses include an $84.4 million pre-tax charge in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2012 ended May 31 that will cover fines from the payment card networks and …

Cybercriminals have introduced a new version of a notorious malware threat that is not only harder to detect but also more capable of stealing card numbers, PINs, and other sensitive information. This latest variant of the so-called Zeus Trojan malware includes a change that makes it virtually invisible to programs …

A recent survey of financial institutions and service providers shows that while attempted takeovers of financial accounts by computer hackers and thieves increased last year, the percentage of successful takeovers dropped. Meanwhile, PayPal Inc. announced a program to pay security researchers for finding flaws in its system. In its second …