A vendor that provides online chat services for customer acquisition and engagement appears to be the common thread in breaches disclosed Wednesday by Delta Air Lines Inc. and Sears Holdings Corp. The service provider is [24]7.ai Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based company that provides services like virtual chat agents and …

Point-of-sale integrators, help desks, and other computer-related service providers for businesses, look out—the hackers are after you. The new Global Security Report 2018 from Chicago-based Trustwave says service providers were involved in 9.5% of the 700-plus data compromises the firm investigated in 2017. In 2016, service providers played a role …

The Federal Reserve announced Thursday that work began this month on a new study to measure fraud and associated costs to the U.S. payments system as well as identify fraud’s causes and contributing factors. After a competitive bidding process, the central bank hired Boston-based The Boston Consulting Group to do …

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 …

At a time when the payment card industry continues to struggle with the consequences of data breaches, the last thing acquirers and issuers need is a slowdown in merchant compliance with critical data-security rules. Yet that is what’s going on, warn the Merchant Acquirers Committee and ControlScan Inc. in survey …

Some 27% of executives with responsibility for their organization’s mobile devices said their firm had experienced a security incident in the past year involving the loss of data or system downtime in which mobile devices played a key role, according to new findings from Verizon Communications Inc. In addition, 32% …

In the wake of the Florida school shooting, First National Bank of Omaha has said it will not renew an agreement it has with the National Rifle Association to issue a cobranded Visa card. American Express Co. said its cardholders can now use their Membership Rewards points to order items …

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 …

First Data Corp.’s struggling merchant-acquiring joint ventures with three big banks are showing nascent signs of a turnaround, and business is booming in the company’s prepaid card unit, top executives reported Monday. The Atlanta-based processor reported last year that new merchant referrals from its big joint ventures with The PNC …

Artificial intelligence (AI) is so unsettling that we look the other way as it encroaches on the fundamentals of what it is to be human. Why do I say this? As AI is envisioned today, each of us humans will have his or her smart self, or “sself.” This sself …