Our daunting set of sticky wickets this time ranges from data breaches that just don’t stop to debit card pitfalls to travails for P2P and Bitcoin. This is Digital Transactions magazine’s 11th annual ranking of payments woes, and one lesson we’ve learned in all that time is that they don’t …

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 …

Issuers, merchants, and processors all share the same dilemma when attempting to authenticate an online identity. They are bedeviled by personally identifiable information easily accessible to criminals that they can use to spoof authentic consumers. In response, Visa Inc. on Thursday announced the Visa ID Intelligence service, which it says …

Add Sonic Drive-In to the roster of merchants that have experienced a breach of their payments systems. The Oklahoma City-based fast-food chain confirmed to Digital Transaction News that it has been investigating the incident. On Tuesday, security blog KrebsOnSecurity.com reported the breach affecting an unknown number of Sonic’s point-of-sale systems. …

Fraud-related expenses for merchants are rising as a percentage of revenues, and merchants now spend 10 times as much preventing fraud as they lose to chargebacks, according to new findings from Javelin Strategy & Research. Pleasanton, Calif.-based Javelin says its June study of 497 e-commerce merchants found that merchants in …

The Faster Payments Task Force issued a final report in July with an eye-popping goal: National, real-time payments by 2020. Here’s a guide to the 16 providers that might just do the job. In July, the Federal Reserve-sponsored Faster Payments Task Force capped off two years of hard work with …

Can the new version of 3D Secure fix the faults of the old one and stem the steady rise of e-commerce fraud? The answer is a big maybe—and here’s why. It has been nearly two decades since the card-network brands introduced 3-Domain Secure 1.0 in an attempt to offer a …

When fraudsters launch a cyber attack, they may not be their target’s worst enemy. Equally troublesome could be the business’s own staff, according to results of a survey of 5,000 companies around the world released Monday by Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based global cybersecurity firm. It turns out employees not only …

As they rapidly evolve, biometric technologies are certain to play a greater role in payment authentication. But, given consumer acceptance and other issues, just how big this role will be is up for debate. With most new developments in payments, there’s a whole lot of talk before any discernible action. …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews North America remains by far the source of most data breaches investigated by Trustwave Holdings Inc., a big security-services and technology provider that operates worldwide, and the retail industry takes the lead in breaches despite the coming of EMV chip card payments to the U.S. Those are …