EAST publishes first Payment Alert

EPTFEAST has just published its first Payment Alert which covers an attack on a payment network through its member associations throughout Europe.  This Alert relates to a recent phishing email sent to employees of related banking and financial institutions.  Phishing is a social engineering attack that has become very popular and has caused severe damages and losses to companies and individuals.

This new Alert is an initiative of the EAST Payments Task Force (EPTF), a specialist task force for discussion of security issues affecting the payments industry and for the gathering, collation and dissemination of related information and statistics.

Rui Carvalho EAST Development Director and EPTF Chair said: “In June last year EAST changed its name to become the European Association for Secure Transactions to expand its remit beyond ATMs to include all terminal types and to also focus on payment transactions.  As card skimming incidents continue to decline in Europe our focus is increasingly moving to Payment related cyber-attacks and Card Not Present (CNP) fraud issues which continue to rise.  The EPTF Payment Alerts will help to bring focus on new and developing threats in these criminal areas.”

Through its Expert Group on All Terminal Fraud (EGAF) EAST has been issuing Fraud Alerts since 2013 (170 Alerts issued to date) and Physical Attack Alerts have been issued by its Expert Group on ATM & ATS Physical Attacks (EGAP) since 2015 (18 Alerts issued to date).

EAST Alerts contain sensitive information and are restricted to EAST Members (National and Associate).  They are classified as AMBER using the variant of the Traffic Light Protocol (TLP) adopted by EAST and an overview of the TLP classifications used by EAST is below:

EAST supports Europol Strategic Payment Card Fraud Meeting

On 20-21 November 2017, Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), with the support of EAST, hosted an international meeting with a specific focus on combating payment card fraud across Europe and beyond.

In its sixth occurrence since it was first organised in Singapore in 2015, this meeting was held for the first time at Europol’s headquarters in The Hague, bringing together representatives from 3 regions of the world: 8 EU Member States (Portugal, Greece, France, Denmark, Spain, Romania, Bulgaria and Italy), Latin America (Argentina, Dominican Republic, Chile, Colombia and AMERIPOL) and Asia (Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and ASEANAPOL).

The EAST presentation focused on combating payment card fraud from the perspective of the private sector – EAST Executive Director Lachlan Gunn gave an overview of EAST and presented the latest threats, criminal methodologies and crime and fraud statistics.  EAST Development Director Rui Carvalho, who chairs the EAST Payments Task Force (EPTF), covered the latest payment crime trends as reported at the 43rd EAST Meeting.

The latest European Central Bank Report estimates €1.44 billion losses in Payment card fraud in 2013 The overall losses were up 8%. Card Not Present (CNP) fraud has experienced significant increases in Europe in the last years and although Card Present Fraud (CP) within the EU decreased during the last years still remain significant as the EMV (chip and pin) protection has not yet been fully implemented. In fact, organised crime groups set up permanent bases in overseas locations where Chip is not implemented cashing out compromised European cards.

EAST has supported all the Europol Strategic Meetings on Payment Card Fraud held in the ASEAN and LATAM regions.

 

EAST Presents at Third Latin American Security Forum

Latin American SecurityRui Carvalho, EAST Development Director, presented at the third Annual Latin American Forum on Security in Payment Systems, held on 18th / 19th October 2017 in Lima, Peru.

The event was co-organised by ATEFI and Liquid Nexxus in order to raise awareness of payment-related crime in Latin America.

ATEFI is the Latin American Association of Operators Electronic Funds Transfer and Information Services and represents 20 ATM networks in 14 countries throughout Latin America.

Rui Carvalho (pictured on the left with Fernanda Romero and Oscar Castellano of ATEFI) presented an overview of Terminal Related Fraud and Transaction Fraud  in Europe from the perspective of the Electronic Payments Industry, as represented by EAST.

In May 2016 EAST and ATEFI joined forces in order to further strengthen cross border cooperation in combating all types of payment crime including payment card fraud, hi-tech crime and ATM cyber and physical attacks.