Mastercard revealed on Wednesday its plan to employ artificial intelligence (AI) to determine if a credit or debit card number has been compromised before it reaches the hands of cybercriminals.
Mastercard has integrated AI into its fraud-prediction system in its new software upgrade, which will be available this week. The company hopes that quickly identifying the compromised cards' details and patterns will make it easier for banks to replace stolen cards before criminals use them.
Mastercard to Use Generative AI to Identify and Resolve Compromised Cards
Mastercard executive vice president of security and cyber innovation Johan Gerber told the Associated Press that generative AI would help them swiftly determine where the cardholders' credentials were compromised, how it possibly happened, and quickly address the situation, especially for customers "who don't know they are compromised yet."
Mastercard noted that the update would allow banks to expedite the replacement of bad cards by using patterns or information, like geography, time, and addresses, combined with incomplete credit card numbers in the databases.
The patterns can also be utilized in reverse, potentially using bad card batches, which could lead to the discovery of compromised merchants or payment processors. According to Gerber, pattern recognition is more advanced than what people could do using database queries or other conventional methods.
Billions of Stolen Credit and Debit Card Numbers Can Be Acquired on the Dark Web
Anyone could buy from the billions of stolen credit card and debit card numbers floating on the dark web. Although most came from businesses hit by data breaches, a sizeable portion of these cards came from innocent customers who made unauthorized purchases at the wrong gas station, ATM, or online store.
These compromised cards can remain undetected for months or years if the payment networks do not look into the dark web for stolen numbers, a merchant knows about a breach, or a criminal uses the card.
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