Mastercard today announced Cyber Secure, a first-of-its-kind, AI-powered suite of tools that allows banks to assess cyber risk across their ecosystem and prevent potential breaches. With these capabilities, banks can identify and prioritize threats and vulnerabilities throughout their cyber environment. Additionally, acquiring banks can help merchants understand their own cyber risk, preventing hundreds of millions of dollars in potential fraud.

As the digital economy expands, both in size and complexity, so too do its points of vulnerability that may be subject to attack. One example of this is the rapidly advancing Internet of Things - 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated by people and their devices every day, with 90% of this generated in the last two years alone.[1] It is estimated that one business will fall victim to a ransomware attack every 11 seconds by next year[2].

“The world today faces a $5.2 trillion cyber breach problem[3].  This is one of the biggest threats to consumer trust.  At Mastercard, we aim to stay ahead of fraudsters and to continually evolve and enhance our protection of cyber environments for our bank and merchant customers.  With Cyber Secure, we have a suite of AI-powered cyber capabilities that allows us to do just that, ensuring trust across every experience, for businesses and consumers,” said Ajay Bhalla, president, Cyber & Intelligence, Mastercard.

Cyber Secure is a big step forward in the continuous quantifying and prioritizing of cyber vulnerabilities.  By empowering banks with the ability to continuously monitor and track their cyber posture, it moves our industry to a more proactive state in managing and preventing data compromise, protecting the integrity of the payment ecosystem and consumer data. In addition, it helps to reduce financial losses associated with attacks, saves time and resources, and provides a comprehensive view of cyber risk through one application.

Drawing on the industry-leading capabilities of RiskRecon, acquired by Mastercard in 2020, the risk assessment is performed using advanced AI that combines multiple public and proprietary data sources. The AI evaluates the data against 40 security and infrastructure criteria, with the impact and importance of each vulnerability analyzed to produce a cyber risk rating and issue priority navigator.

In 2019, Mastercard saved stakeholders $20bn of fraud through its AI-enabled cyber systems.  Cyber Secure forms a key part of Mastercard’s multi-layered cyber security strategy to secure the ecosystem, protect cyber environments, define industry standards and collaborate across industries. 

[1] IBM Marketing Cloud, 10 Key Marketing Trends For 2017
[2] Varonis Cyber Security Statistics, 2020
[3] Accenture Ninth Annual Cost Of Cyber Crime Study, 2019