Remember the good old days, when you tossed a quarter into the peddler’s jar and picked up the daily paper in the train station? Now that was frictionless. You did not know the peddler. He had no clue who you were. You did not receive any paperwork: no invoice, no …

Some 124 new data breaches have become known this year as of Feb. 16, the Identity Theft Resource Center reports. And the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors issued a study last week pegging the cost of malicious cyber activity to the economy in 2016 at $57 billion on the …

The U.S. Secret Service began warning financial institutions last week about ATM “jackpotting,” in which a machine quickly spits out huge amounts of cash after being physically compromised by organized gangs and infected with a variant of malware first seen in 2013, according to KrebsOnSecurity. Hackers are especially targeting Diebold …

Cyber fraud has matured into a solid industry, where economies and efficiencies count. So the lion’s share of hacking efforts is directed at large databases, where a breach is a gift that keeps on giving (as long as it is well-managed). Financial institutions and online merchants, in particular, use databases …

Kansas-based ATM operator Prineta LLC said it has acquired 20 ATMs in Corpus Christi and Coastal South Texas. The seller’s identity was not immediately available. Prineta operates more than 1,000 ATMs nationwide, according to a spokesman. This is the company’s third ATM acquisition in 2017. Forever 21 Inc. reported encryption …

The price paid for the dazzling convenience of swipe-and-pay and thumb-and-buy is the monstrosity of backroom complexity. The convenience of Venmo, PayPal, and Square hides the growing dependence on layers on layers of protocols, equipment, and technologies. Indeed, the flipside of clicking out your banking needs on your phone is …

This malware is a nuisance to many, but could mean big trouble for payments companies. Criminals, much like legitimate businesses, know that the real money is in volume. They would rather have their malicious software on millions of computers than on just a few thousand. The wider the net, the …

Financial institutions are realizing that a smooth experience is as important to consumers when identifying themselves as the authentication strategy itself, regardless of the channel consumers use to access their accounts. This finding is part of a new study from NICE Actimize, a Hoboken, N.J.-based provider of risk-management and compliance …

Despite non-stop news reports about data breaches, Americans over the past year have gotten sloppier about their usage of passwords to protect their financial accounts online. That’s the word from research firm Aite Group LLC and Visa Inc., which recently announced results of their second annual Global Security Engagement Scorecard …

With a rapidly expanding e-commerce market, online fraud-detection and -prevention efforts are poised to grow over the next few years. Merchants are expected to spend $9.3 billion annually on these efforts by 2022, says Juniper Research. That’s a 22% increase from the 2017 spending total, though it pales in comparison …