Visa, FireEye Unveil Web Portal Meant To Share Malware Threats Faster

FireEye and Visa announced a service Tuesday that aims to increase threat awareness between merchants and the cybersecurity company. It's the first product to come out of the joint venture between FireEye and Visa announced in June.

The subscription service, called Visa Threat Intelligence, includes a Web portal where Visa clients can share and view cyberintelligence, threat analysis and information on malicious software. The goal, FireEye says, is for the chief information officer at one Visa client to upload information to the Web portal so CIOs at other companies using Visa can have information on the malware within an hour.

“Ultimately the goal is to identify a breach before the data can be used or exfiltrated,” said Mark Nelson, senior vice president for risk products and business intelligence at Visa. "There are more events now, the magnitude is bigger and there's more sophistication, but the reports of fraud have gone down."

Visa Threat Intelligence is scheduled to become available in the United States in November. A premium service promises to use information from FireEye to analyze where malware originates, including the IP address. FireEye tracked 226 international data breaches in 2014, the company said.

It's the first product to come out since FireEye announced in June it would launched an online service “to enhance stakeholders' knowledge of attacks targeting the ecosystem, providing a significant improvement over the current industry practices of sharing threat intelligence via email or static documents.” The California company has yet to post a profit, despite being involved in investigating major breaches at Sony Pictures, Anthem health insurance, Target and other companies.

Visa Threat Intelligence is the credit industry's latest attempt to reduce fraud since hackers and foreign governments increasingly have targeted customer payment information. Companies also have invested more to find anomalies in global payment trends (which could indicate fraud) and in secure chip technology that encrypts customer account information at the point of sale.