Fraud & Security

Microsoft Corp. used a trio of legal tools last month to raid an alleged cybercrime operation that had been using the infamous Zeus virus to steal funds and data from the financial-services industry, the software giant disclosed on Monday. The raids, which Microsoft and partner organizations first announced March 25, …

The re-terminalization of the merchant point of sale to accept EMV chip cards could generate more than $6 billion in revenues for independent sales organizations and other merchant acquirers, but the changeover is fraught with competitive and operational risks, according to a new research report by Aite Group LLC. Aite …

As more and more companies vie to put mobile card-acceptance gear in the hands of tiny merchants, acquirers are starting to look at signing up merchants on their own merchant account rather than using the more traditional—but also more time-consuming–process of establishing an account for each seller. The method isn’t …

Among card networks, payment processors, point-of-sale terminal manufacturers, and even issuers, the coming of EMV chip card payments to the U.S. has an aura of inevitability on par with Mitt Romney securing the Republican presidential nomination. But just don’t tell that to one critically important sector in electronic payments: merchants. …

  In the wake of an unusual public outburst by a top security officer at software giant Oracle Corp., the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council issued a statement on Thursday to Digital Transactions News defending a little-known rule that requires vendors to disclose security holes in their software. …

Merchant processor Global Payments Inc. says it believes fewer than 1.5 million card numbers were taken from its processing system in a data breach disclosed on Friday. Meanwhile, Visa Inc. has removed Global from its list of merchant processors compliant with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI), but Global …

Merchant processor Global Payments Inc. confirmed late Friday afternoon that it sustained a data breach following press accounts earlier in the day of a breach variously reported as affecting 50,000 to potentially millions of payment cards. In a press release, Atlanta-based Global “announced it identified and self-reported unauthorized access into …

Online travel agencies are well-known fraud targets, and now new data from CyberSource Corp. suggest that fraudsters make more attempts against them than other sectors of the travel industry. But the data also show that the so-called OTAs’ fraud losses as a percentage of revenue are actually less than elsewhere …

Payments fraud against companies moderated during 2011, with the share of companies experiencing payments fraud falling to the lowest level since 2004, according to the Association for Financial Professionals’ latest annual study of corporate payments fraud. Nevertheless, the level of fraud remained elevated, with the majority of organizations reporting attempted …

Amazon.com Inc. quietly killed its PayPhrase online-authentication service on Feb. 20, not quite two-and-a-half years after introducing the system. The PayPhrase credentials system allowed online shoppers to check out using only a word or phrase of their choosing and a PIN that they had registered with the Amazon Payments service. …