Visa and FireEye join hands to protect payment data

USA: Visa and FireEye announced their intention to co-develop tools and services to help merchants and issuers protect against advanced cyber attacks targeting payment data.

“The threat environment for merchants is more hostile than we’ve ever seen - attack groups focused exclusively on stealing consumer data are continuously expanding their operations and employing new techniques. It’s a daunting prospect for any merchant whose business could collapse if they lose customer trust,” said David DeWalt, CEO of FireEye.

Many data compromises have similar attack patterns reinforcing the importance of collective knowledge sharing to help merchants prepare and monitor for known threats.

"We intend to bring faster, actionable intelligence directly to players across the payments system,” said Charlie Scharf, CEO of Visa Inc.

Enhanced monitoring of malicious attacks and suspicious payment activity will help in alerting merchants of potential compromises. Identifying these data compromises earlier means fewer stolen accounts and greater protection for their customers.

The Visa and FireEye Community Threat Intelligence (CTI) offering will bring together threat information from both companies, allowing merchants and issuers to quickly detect and respond to attacks against their IT and payment infrastructure.

As strategic partners, FireEye and Visa initially plan to offer tools that will provide greater cyber intelligence and enhanced threat monitoring and will continue to work together, along with FireEye’s cyber forensics group Mandiant, to add more capabilities tailored to issuers and merchants of all sizes.