Fraud & Security

The Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) Alliance, a non-profit with more than 150 members in banking, payments, technology, and other industries, on Tuesday published its first standard for a better system of online authentication than the common but vulnerable user name and password. “Today, we celebrate an achievement that will define …

  The Merchant Financial Cyber Partnership, a unique coalition of eight financial-services trade associations and 11 merchant groups, wants Congress to make it easier for retailers and financial institutions to share information with each other related to data breaches. Merchants and financial-services companies often are bitter foes when it comes …

What’s that big, juicy new target out there for cyber-hackers? Apple Pay, of course. And don’t forget ATMs, either, since many deployers have yet to upgrade machines running old, increasingly vulnerable versions of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP operating system. Apple Pay and ATMs are included on Woburn, Mass.-based data-security services …

  Parking-garage operator SP Plus Corp. says card readers at 17 garages it operates were hacked this fall, with one breach extending back to April. Chicago-based SP Plus says the company that provides and maintains the payment card systems in the 17 garages—10 are in Chicago, three in Evanston, Ill., …

  No doubt merchants and the payments industry understand the value of removing valuable cardholder data from merchant payment systems via tokenization. Doing so, however, may complicate merchants\' data-security practices and carry costs, suggests Avivah Litan, vice president and analyst at advisory firm Gartner Inc., in a blog post. Tokenization …

  Mobile payments in Canada only garner 2% of all consumer purchases, finds a study from research firm GfK. But that does not signal the low adoption rate will continue. Only 21% of Canadian shoppers, defined as those who have shopped in one of 15 product categories in the past …

At trade show after trade show, and in article after article, payments-industry executives have heard for years now that the U.S. migration to chip cards on the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) standard, while protecting the point of sale from counterfeit fraud, will force fraudsters to ply their craft online. Indeed, the idea …

Target Corp. reported Wednesday that expenses stemming from the big data breach it disclosed 11 months ago now total $248 million. The Home Depot Inc., meanwhile, said Tuesday that the data breach it disclosed in September cost it $28 million on a pre-tax basis in its recently ended third quarter. …

  First Data Corp. will update its TransArmor tokenization service in 2015 to make it platform-agnostic, while expanding the number of sales channels it is available through, says a First Data executive. Launched in 2010, TransArmor provides merchants a way to mask sensitive cardholder data by replacing them with a …

  Want to know where the chargebacks are coming from? Chargebacks911 has ranked the top five U.S. cities in terms of chargeback rates, placing a ZIP code in Show Low, Ariz., with a 2.2% rate, at the top. The study of 500,000 chargebacks of e-commerce transactions made in 2013 indicates …