Fraud & Security

Efforts to create unique identification markers for consumers across different merchants will be a challenge for many merchants this year, SIX Payment Services, the payment-processing arm of SIX, operator of Switzerland’s financial-market infrastructure, notes in a report released Wednesday. “Some payment-service providers are working on the idea of introducing a …

Credit unions are making fast progress in their rollout of EMV chip cards, according to an update from PSCU, a major payments processor for this segment of the financial-services industry. Some 85% of PSCU’s clients have introduced, or are introducing, EMV credit cards, while the corresponding number for EMV debit …

The Federal Reserve’s recently released 2016 Payments Study shows that counterfeiting was the biggest type of U.S. card fraud last year. But other types of fraud, especially card-not-present fraud, are rising quickly, thanks in part to the coming of EMV chip cards and the aftereffects of data breaches. The Fed study says counterfeit fraudaccounted …

The Anti-Phishing Working Group reported that the total number of phishing Web sites detected in the third quarter was 364,424, a 21.8% decrease from 466,065 in the second quarter. The APWG said the second-quarter figures were an “all-time-high” for phishing attacks and the third-quarter data is a return to more historical norms. …

ATM deployers reporting a “general increase” in physical and fraudulent attacks on their machines declined to 42% this year from 51% in 2015, according to new data from the ATM Industry Association. While that overall finding was good news, skimming, PIN compromises, malware, and other types of fraud-related attacks on ATMs remain …

• Yahoo! Inc. disclosed Wednesday a breach of more than 1 billion user accounts in August 2013 that is separate from one involving 500 million accounts the Web giant announced in September. Yahoo said the new breach involved names, email addresses, birth dates, secure passwords, and security questions and answers, but did not …

Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. have been tokenizing their payment cards since 2014, but have not been able to access tokens for cards branded by the other network. That will change soon as the result of an agreement announced separately Thursday by Visa and MasterCard. Under the agreement, Visa will be able …

In the struggle to produce commercially viable alternatives to the password for user authentication, most industry attention lately has focused on fingerprint recognition. But on Monday another promising alternative took a step forward with an announcement from Delta ID Inc., a 5-year-old Newark, Calif.-based company, that its ActiveIRIS technology is behind …

• Cyber criminals can guess Visa card numbers and other information required for fraudulent online purchases in a matter of seconds, according to researchers. By distributing multiple guesses across many sites, the method avoids triggering automated guess limits at any single site, according to a paper in IEEE Security & Privacy, a …

In a move that expands its business as a provider of risk-control services for merchants and card issuers, Visa Inc. announced Thursday that it has a deal to acquire e-commerce payment-authentication provider CardinalCommerce Corp. Founded in 1999, Mentor, Ohio-based CardinalCommerce’s signature product is Cardinal Secure Authentication, a service that uses …