Cybersecurity in New Payment Ecosystems

By CIOReview | Wednesday, October 25, 2017

With the evolution of payment ecosystems one of the major issues that arise is that of cybersecurity. When looking at the victims of cyber attacks, no one is really shown mercy—the government, financial institutions, large, medium and small enterprises alike. The cost of rise in collaborations between industry barons in the new payment ecosystem is that of a higher chance leaving the systems vulnerable.

To mitigate this risk, enterprises are looking out for their banks for advice on the process of raising their walls against cyber threats and attacks. In order to affirm state-of-the-art level security for the evolved payment ecosystems as well as the infrastructure itself, each collaborator needs to evaluate the security along each data foundation as well as collaboration points.

There is a need for strong and vigorous cyber security solutions is at its all-time high currently. The vulnerabilities faced include data privacy and breaches, and payment frauds. A survey on fraud conducted by the Association of Financial Professionals along with JP Morgan indicated that the highest frauds in 2016 were committed through cheques. Also, the drastic rise in frauds perpetrated via wire transfers from 27 percent in 2014 to 46 percent in 2016 was indicated.

In the last few decades, 2016 and 2017 saw the maximum hit of cyber attacks, such as, the WannaCry Ransomware (2017) which attacked 150+ countries with over 200,000 computers for a ransom of $300 worth of bitcoins to allow their systems to function normally. Although many banks invest a significant amount of time, money and manpower to counter cyber security, the risks faced by those on the corporate level are hard to handle. Corporate can be expected to tighten their own physical and virtual security without leaving the entire load on banks. Also, it is important to upgrade the existing security and train internal staff to be better prepared for a threat and to counter it.