Rippleshot Blog

In this week's issue: Uber hires a new security officer from Facebook, financial institutions and retailers are skirmishing over the upcoming EMV deadline, UC Riverside suffers a data breach exposing the personal information of 8,000, AT&T is going to settle a data breach complaint by agreeing to pay $25 million and for the Rippleshot content of the week, we've put together a great infographic using Rippleshot research to determine the top five most compromised merchant categories in the U.S. 

According to the Breach Level Index, over 1 Billion data records were stolen in 2014 - nearly 20% of those including financial information. But where is financial information being compromised, specifically? Rippleshot research has found that over 60% of payment card accounts that got stolen in 2014 can be tied back to five merchant categories.

In this week's issue: various Dark Net sites are selling thousands of Uber passwords, the U.S. Justice Department wants power to fight U.S. card fraud abroad, business communications app Slack suffers a data breach, President Obama declares cyberattacks a national emergency and this week we're proud to introduce our latest white paper on EMV adoption in the U.S.

On March 26, Rippleshot and two other innovative companies competed for the Merchant Risk Council's annual 2015 MRC Emerging Technology Awards (METAwards).

In this week's issue: live streaming website Twitch experiences a data breach, a national data security breach bill moves one step forward, a Hilton HHonors security flaw exposed all of its users' accounts, nearly seven in ten U.S. patients would avoid healthcare providers that suffer a data breach and in this week's Rippleshot blog post, we take a look at data breach fatigue and its impact on consumers. 

Over the past few years, data breaches have pounded the payments industry.  Target’s 40-million credit and debit card data breach washed away their C-suite, billions of their market capitalization, and hundreds of millions of profit in lost sales and imposed fines. The list of catastrophic data breaches continues to grow as Issuers struggle with a rising tide of fraud losses, merchants faced with a public breach are most often swept under within six months. Consumers, faced with reissued card after reissued card feel lost at sea, distrustful of the whole system.

On Monday, Rippleshot joined the Chicago Innovation Awards team and fellow 2014 winners in New York City to ring the Closing Bell at the Nasdaq Stock Market.

In this week's issue: another health care provider has suffered a data breach, Target is looking to settle its 2013 data breach lawsuit, a recent Verizon report indicated that nearly half of all American consumers have been affected by a data breach, Uber discloses information regarding its driver-related data breach and in this week's Rippleshot blog post, we take a look at the fraudulent spending related to cards used on Apple Pay.

Rippleshot, a fraud protection company, was selected out of 850 startup applicants by key anchor partners including CapitalOne, CitiBank/Citi Ventures, and USAA to participate in Plug and Play’s 12 week FinTech accelerator program.

For much of past year, the debut of Apple Pay was eagerly anticipated to be the solution to a litany of credit card payment problems. And certainly the new method of transacting is game-changing in that it employs not only a cryptogram (much like EMV credit and debit transactions use), but also a dynamically generated 16-digit token, ensuring that merchants never directly receive or have the ability to store customers’ actual credit card numbers - which would go a long way toward preventing the large payment card breaches that have dotted the landscape for the last several years.

In addition to the tokenization, transactions are also authorized using either Touch ID (fingerprint) or through a PIN number, providing an extra layer of security to ensure that purchases are verified through the iPhone owner, in case the device gets lost or stolen.

But the problem isn’t with the transactions themselves - it’s with the card set up process.

In this week's issue: the University of Chicago suffers a data breach affecting students, current and former employees, a point-of-sale vendor probes a potential data breach affecting its customers, a campaign is pushing card issuing banks to promote Chip and PIN and in the latest Rippleshot blog post, we pull 10 more data breach statistics that you need to see.

The number of U.S. data breaches grew 27.5% and hit a record high of 783 in 2014, according to a recent report released by the Identify Theft Resource Center. With data breaches growing at an alarming rate, you should be aware of the latest statistics. If last month's Data Breach Statistics surprised you, the following will be even more concerning:

In this week's issue: a data breach was announced affecting Mandarin Hotels, MasterCard backs Samsung Pay following the Mobile World Congress, several finanical institutions are starting to see a rise in fraud related to Apple Pay, a Canadian ISP suffers a data breach and in the latest Rippleshot blog post, we dive into the New York State Department of Financial Services latest report on cyber security in the insurance sector.

Many have called 2014 “the year of the data breach,” which saw breaches affect retail organizations including Target, Home Depot, P.F. Chang’s and UPS. These data breaches combined for over 220 million exposed records in a period of just over 15 months. However, cyber criminals may have their sights set on a much more lucrative and untapped industry in 2015, insurance and health care providers.

In this week's issue: the Anthem data breach could affect 8.8 million non-customers, Target lists its data breach costs at $162 million for 2013-14, Gemalto investigates the claims that government agencies hacked its SIM card encryption keys, Google plans to launch its new mobile payment API and in the latest Rippleshot blog post, we take a look at President Obama's Executive Order on cybersecurity.