The global Internet of Things needs to have great cybersecurity—that’s why leading card provider Mastercard just acquired financial cybersecurity firm NuData Security.
An estimated 50 billion IoT devices will be connected by 2020, according to Mastercard, which has already developed smart fridge solutions, and is currently working on smart homes, smart cars, and other wearable devices for its customers.
Mastercard will be implementing NuData alongside its own fraud products, which should enable better IoT security. Terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed.
As demonstrated by the spread of ransomware, such as the Mirai botnet–which took down sites like Twitter and PayPal through unsecured IoT last year –security in the Internet of Things is going to be a top customer concern.
This is where NuData comes in.
The company guards against fraud using session and biometric indicators for authentication—so it can protect against anything, from changes in behavior (such as keystroke) to a biometric mismatch.
The company’s flagship product, NuDetect, can assess a user’s sessions in an online or mobile environment, before scoring that session with a level of fraud risk and reporting those sessions with the highest level of risk.
NuDetect also learns patterns from one session to the next, meaning that merchants and issuers on the Mastercard network will now be able to authenticate users much more quickly. As many IoT devices lack even the most basic security measures, this is a much-needed level of fraud detection.
Kiki del Valle, senior vice president for digital payments and labs for Mastercard, spoke on IoT at the Bank Innovation 2017 conference in San Jose: