Against the backdrop of a seemingly never-ending river of credit card data heists, Visa and FireEye have debuted a joint service to deliver real-time threat information to merchants and card issuers.
Each week, merchants and card issuers receive thousands of alerts about possible cyberattacks, making it difficult to know which ones to focus on. Appropriately named Visa Threat Intelligence, Powered by FireEye, the idea behind the new offering is to give the payments industry a tool for quickly assessing and acting on the most critical cyber-attacks that specifically could breach payment systems, by isolating those from the rest of the threat landscape noise.
“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, SVP and CTO at FireEye. “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.”
Beginning late 2015, subscribers will gain access to a 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.
"One of our main objectives with this partnership is to provide faster and more actionable intelligence to our stakeholders," said Mark Nelsen, senior vice president of risk products and business intelligence at Visa, speaking at FireEye’s Cyber Threat Security Summit this week in Washington D.C. "There are more data compromise events now than there ever have been. We recently saw a 23 percent increase in data events, and not only are there more, but the magnitude is bigger."
This is the first product available as part of a new global strategic partnership between the two companies—a partnership that aims to take a holistic view of the threats to the sector. Also speaking at the summit, FireEye CEO Dave Dewalt, stressed the importance of taking a worldwide view.
"We've really tried to build our global company," he told attendees. "What we're trying to do as a company is build a global threat management platform. There's no perfect Gartner Magic Quadrant for this, but our vison and strategy as a company is really to help our clients and partners develop a capability that can very quickly detect and respond to threats."