Mastercard has announced Mastercard Threat Intelligence, the first threat intelligence offering applied to payments at scale. The solution brings together Mastercard’s fraud insights and global network visibility with curated cyber threat intelligence from Recorded Future’s platform to help payment fraud and merchant compliance teams at issuing and acquiring banks proactively detect, prevent and respond to cyber-enabled fraud.
Fraud rarely starts at the point of transaction – it often originates as a cyberattack. Sixty percent of global fraud leaders report that they are notified of cyber breaches only after fraud losses begin. Payment fraud is no longer just a financial issue for fraud teams — it’s a cybersecurity challenge that directly impacts an organization’s bottom line. Mastercard Threat Intelligence bridges communication gaps, enabling fraud and security teams to work together seamlessly to stop fraud before it happens.
“As the lines between cybercrime and financial crime continue to blur, innovation is an imperative,” said Johan Gerber, global head of Security Solutions at Mastercard. “Mastercard Threat Intelligence provides customers with actionable, real-time and targeted risk insights to disrupt fraudulent transactions, inform strategic defense and ultimately enable a more proactive approach.
Key features of Mastercard Threat Intelligence include:
- Card testing detection: Real-time alerts and proactive declines of fraudulent test transactions, reducing downstream fraud and safeguarding cardholders
- Digital skimming intelligence: Quantitative data to help customers assess skimmer impacts and disrupt card-related malware, tapping into Mastercard’s ongoing work with industry partners to protect the payment ecosystem
- Merchant threat intelligence: Targeted payment fraud insights and high-level payment threat intelligence to assess merchant risk and enable faster incident response
- Payment ecosystem threat intelligence: Weekly reports detailing emerging threats and vulnerabilities across the broader payments landscape
- Payment intelligence reports: Actionable case studies and fraud trend analysis to inform strategy and strengthen defenses
The launch of Mastercard Threat Intelligence comes less than a year after Mastercard finalized its acquisition of Recorded Future, and demonstrates the companies’ commitment to delivering a unified, intelligence-led approach to securing the digital economy.
“Effective cybersecurity will increasingly depend on threat intelligence that crosses sectors and regions. Vendors with broad transactional data and analytics will play a key role in improving information-sharing among financial services, merchants and across the industry,” said Tracy (Kitten) Goldberg, director, Cybersecurity at Javelin Strategy & Research.
“New doors are opening for advanced threat intel,” she added, “facilitated through successful cyber fusion that incorporates a myriad of tools across identity verification, fraud detection, and indicators of compromise. Feeding threat intel across disparate teams and industries in meaningful and useful ways will help fraud and cybersecurity teams more readily identify trends, placing them in positions to move from reactive response to proactive mitigation.”
Threat intelligence data has already helped Mastercard’s ecosystem partners identify and take down malicious domains that were responsible for the theft of payment card data. Since market testing began and over the course of six months, these malicious domains had impacted nearly 9,500 e-commerce sites and were linked to an estimated $120 million in fraud.
“Mastercard Threat Intelligence will help us to keep the pace with main threats and trends, something that is not possible today due to high-demanding operations in the bank,” said Banco Mercantil del Norte’s fraud expert Irvin Salinas Pineda.
