Mastercard launches AI cybersecurity, risk assessment tool

By Sunniva Kolostyak

Mastercard has unveiled Cyber Secure, an AI-powered suite, to help banks assess cyber risk and identify threats and vulnerabilities across their digital ecosystem.

The first-of-its-kind solution offers cyber capabilities for both the banks and their businesses, helping them prioritise which vulnerabilities. This way, they can understand their own cyber risk and prevent potential fraud.

Cyber fraud has grown rapidly with the expansion of the digital economy, both in size and complexity. One example of this is the rapidly advancing Internet of Things (IoT) – 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated by people and their devices every day, with 90 per cent of this generated in the last two years alone, Mastercard explained.

Moreover, it is estimated that one business will fall victim to a ransomware attack every 11 seconds by next year.

The Cyber Secure suite aims to address these threats by empowering banks with round-the-clock tracking and monitoring of their positioning, and by taking a proactive approach to preventing data compromise. For example, acquiring banks will be able to help merchants understand their own cyber risk.

Using the capabilities of RiskRecon, which was acquired by Mastercard in 2020, Cyber Secure performs assessments 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 analysed to produce a cyber risk rating and issue priority navigator.

Ajay Bhalla, president, Cyber & Intelligence at Mastercard, commented: “The world today faces a $5.2 trillion cyber breach problem. 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.”

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