Visa and FireEye Launch Threat Intel Service for Payments Industry

Visa and FireEye today launched Visa Threat Intelligence, a new offering powered by FireEye that delivers real-time threat information to merchants and payment card issuers.

In an effort to help payments industry stakeholders assess and act on potentially damaging cyber attacks that could breach their payment systems, the offering is the first product available as part of a new strategic partnership between the two firms.

According to FireEye, subscribers will have access to a web-based portal which provides cyber intelligence relevant to payment systems, including alerts on malicious actors, methods, trends in cyber attacks, and in-depth forensic analysis from recent data beaches.

“Each week, merchants and card issuers receive thousands of alerts about possible cyber attacks, making it difficult to know which ones to focus on,” Mark Nelsen, Senior Vice President of Risk Products and Business Intelligence at Visa, said in a statement. “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.”

“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,” FireEye CEO David DeWalt said in June, when plans for the partnership were first announced.

The Visa Threat Intelligence service will also provide a platform where clients can connect with each other and 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,” FireEye explained.

 

Adopters of the platform can also leverage APIs that supply threat indicator data to their own security systems. Additionally, a premium offering will provide access to tools, such as FireEye’s Multi-Vector Virtual Execution (MVX™) engine to analyze and isolate malicious indicators from malware to identify suspicious activity from IP addresses and domains, FireEye said.

“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 Chief Technology Officer, 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.”

Early next year, the partnership is expected to deliver additional solutions to help identify malicious communications and provide mitigation advice based on activity in the network as well as infection rates across the network, FireEye said.