Fraud & Security

This week’s revelation by The Home Depot Inc. that it has incurred $263 million in expenses from its 2014 data breach means that the home-improvement retailer’s breach costs, together with those of another big-box retailer, Target Corp., now total $554 million. In a quarterly regulatory filing Tuesday, Atlanta-based Home Depot …

U.S. e-commerce merchants are struggling with more fraud, but they’re also contending with two related problems that are on the rise and costing them plenty of time and money—manual reviews and false rejections, also known as false positives. That’s according to two studies, one released on Wednesday and the other …

Independent sales organizations, merchant acquirers, and payment facilitators catering to small-business owners who have e-commerce sites now can sell them a MasterCard Inc. service to help mitigate the risk associated with card-not-present transactions. MasterCard introduced Simplify Controls Monday, a service that includes an online dashboard and app that enables merchants …

• Merchant processor Heartland Payment Systems introduced Heartland Insights, a data and analytics service for restaurants that relies on the company’s point-of-sale and e-commerce solutions. Heartland recently became part of rival processor Global Payments Inc. • Canadian payments provider Beanstream expanded its service to U.S. merchants and integrated partners with …

• Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) said it is integrating a machine-learning engine from Featurespace that will allow the processor to generate real-time decisions on individual consumers. TSYS says the speedier fraud-control processing will help prepare its clients for the arrival of real-time payments. • Plastc Inc., which markets a …

The Wendy’s Co. admitted publicly Wednesday that a point-of-sale system at “fewer than 300” of its franchised restaurants in North America had been affected by malware, starting last fall. In a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Dublin, Ohio-based hamburger chain also said it has worked with …

Gift cards are the target of a crackdown in the first half of 2016. Next month, PayPal Holdings Inc. will no longer allow items equivalent to cash, including gift cards, to be covered by PayPal’s Seller Protection program for merchants. And prepaid card provider Blackhawk Network Holdings Inc. recently reported …

With the rollout of EMV chip cards in the United States shrinking opportunities for criminals to use counterfeit cards at the point of sale, fraud rings are turning their attention to customer-contact centers as a way to fraudulently order replacement credit and debit cards and take over consumer accounts. More …

A well-crafted email message from an executive can cause employees to take swift action. That’s just what criminals hope for when they send phishing messages that purport to be from senior executives to more junior ones, says Scott Montgomery, vice president and chief technical strategist at Intel Security, the data-protection …

So far, online merchants are winning the battle against fraud, but the gains are coming at a high cost, according to the latest annual fraud study from CyberSource Corp., set for release next week with results for 2015. The progress also comes as card-not-present merchants prepare for an expected onslaught …