The financial-services industry is closer than you think to widespread adoption of biometric authentication, says Kirsty Tull. Here’s why. There is always that scene in action and spy movies. You know the one. In Mission: Impossible, they must defeat the facial-recognition system to access some secret data. James Bond’s gun …

Cyberfraud is maturing into a stable, highly profitable business, adopting modern management principles and investing heavily in innovation. It has already evolved into an impressive, sophisticated, well-managed, capitalistic environment, composed of bold hack-innovators, hack-services providers, hack analytics, hack market promoters, and some hacking line soldiers, who are the ones who …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Payments professionals who suspect fraud is getting significantly worse were confirmed in their suspicions Wednesday with a report indicating identity fraud hit an all-time high in 2016, affecting some 15.4 million U.S. consumers. That’s up nearly 18% from 2015 and represents a one-third increase from the …

Credit card numbers were involved in just under one-fifth of the 4,000-plus data breaches worldwide reported in 2016, data-security services provider Risk Based Security Inc. reported Wednesday. RBS says the latest release of its annual Data Breach QuickView found that 4,149 data breaches occurred or became publicly known in 2016, …

• Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) reported that it is talking with the Federal Trade Commission to settle the FTC’s November lawsuit accusing TSYS’s NetSpend prepaid card unit of deceptively marketing reloadable prepaid cards. TSYS took a $13 million charge in the fourth quarter in connection with the settlement talks. • Newtek …

In the battle over online bill payments, biller sites have been beating bank and third-party sites handily, but now the battle has turned into a rout. Biller sites accounted for fully 73% of online bills paid by consumers last year, up from 62% in 2010, according to a report released …

The Anti-Phishing Working Group reported that the total number of phishing Web sites detected in the third quarter was 364,424, a 21.8% decrease from 466,065 in the second quarter. The APWG said the second-quarter figures were an “all-time-high” for phishing attacks and the third-quarter data is a return to more historical norms. …

• Yahoo! Inc. disclosed Wednesday a breach of more than 1 billion user accounts in August 2013 that is separate from one involving 500 million accounts the Web giant announced in September. Yahoo said the new breach involved names, email addresses, birth dates, secure passwords, and security questions and answers, but did not …

The ever-expanding Internet of Things could represent a back-to-the-future security nightmare for the payments industry. What’s a network without endpoints? Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. have big networks—about 8 million endpoints in the form of merchant locations that include point-of-sale terminals in the U.S. alone. But the Internet of Things, …

It’s Round 2 for the online-authentication technology known as 3-D Secure, and security experts say it stands a good chance of being more popular than the original version. EMVCo, the chip card standards body owned by the world’s six leading payment card networks, released 3-D Secure 2.0 in late October. …