Visa has introduced Threat Intelligence, Powered by FireEye, which aggregates threat information in real time and notifies issuers and merchants of attacks in progress. This is a new service that trusted participants can subscribe to:
“Tailored to the needs of the payments industry, this new service will deliver real-time threat information to merchants and issuers so they can quickly assess and act on the most critical cyber-attacks that could breach their payment systems.
Visa Threat Intelligence is the first product available as part of a new global strategic partnership between Visa Inc. and FireEye. Beginning late 2015, subscribers will gain access to a powerful web portal that distills the latest proprietary cyber intelligence relevant to payment systems into actionable information, including timely alerts on malicious actors, methods, trends in cyber-attacks, and in-depth forensic analysis from recent data breaches.
‘Each week, merchants and card issuers receive thousands of alerts about possible cyber-attacks, making it difficult to know which ones to focus on,’ said Mark Nelsen, Senior Vice President of Risk Products and Business Intelligence, Visa Inc. ‘Visa Threat Intelligence removes the noise by assessing hundreds of threat indicators and serving-up the most important and timely information. Users can then isolate and address those threats that are the most pressing and potentially damaging to their business and customers.’
For more sophisticated subscribers the signals collected and analysis collected by FireEye can be directly integrated into the IT infrastructure utilizing APIs:
More sophisticated users can also take advantage of APIs that can automatically feed threat indicator data into their own security systems. A premium offering will grant access to advanced tools, powered by FireEye virtual execution engine (MVX™) technology, that analyze and isolate malicious indicators from malware to identify suspicious activity from IP addresses and domains.
In addition, Visa Threat Intelligence will provide a secure platform where clients can opt to form trusted communities and safely exchange real-time threat intelligence. Leveraging community-based intelligence is crucial to a comprehensive defense strategy because many attack groups run campaigns that target organizations with a similar profile.
‘Attack groups are exceptionally skilled at executing an attack across multiple organizations, identifying successful techniques and scaling those methods to an entire industry,’ said Grady Summers, Chief Technology Officer, FireEye, Inc. ‘By partnering with Visa, we can provide targeted intelligence to the payments industry to combat the economies of scale that attackers employ and help create a community united in a common defense.’ ”
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group
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