Mastercard today announced Threat Scan, a unique global service that helps banks proactively identify potential vulnerabilities in their authorization systems. The service was showcased this week at the Mastercard Cybersecurity Summit in Croatia.

Cyber criminals are relentless in their efforts to exploit weaknesses in authorization systems. According to the Boston Consulting Group, cyberattacks hit financial services firms 300 times more often than companies in other industries. With cyberattacks on the rise, implementing fraud technology tools may not be enough to mitigate the risk. Threat Scan complements an issuer’s existing fraud tools by proactively imitating known criminal transaction behavior to assess their authorization system responses before exploitation and fraud loss can occur.

“Our customers increasingly rely on us to provide solutions that help make their systems safer and more secure. Threat Scan enables our customers to stay one step ahead, act faster and minimize the risks that expose them to attacks. As cyberattacks grow in scale and sophistication, it is critical that we advance trust in our payments system,” said Johan Gerber, executive vice president, Security and Cyber Innovation, Mastercard.

How it Works

Using an evolving array of test scenarios from Mastercard global insights into criminal behaviors, the Threat Scan application simulates known fraudulent attacks on issuers and pinpoints authorization security weaknesses.  As cyber criminals identify new ways to gain access into a system, the scenarios can be added to the range of tests and instantly ran against systems globally. When the scan is completed, issuers will see the results immediately in the Threat Scan application report pane. The resulting insights enable issuers to assess their fraud exposure and take targeted actions that shore up the weakest links in their defenses before fraud occurs.

“Threat Scan is part of our multi-layered security strategy to secure the payments ecosystem. Customers who participated in our pilot told us they gained valuable insights into how to secure their authorization systems against future attacks. Many were surprised by what we found,” says Johan.

Security by Design

Mastercard has a long history of investing and innovating across multiple layers of technology to protect customers and cardholders from fraudulent activity and keep payments safe, including EMV chip technology, artificial intelligence, biometrics, tokenization and authentication with security solutions such as Decision Intelligence, Safety Net, Early Detection and NuDetect.