Cashless payments are growing rapidly in Asia-Pacific and so is cybercrime, costing the region an estimated $US 81 billion. With new combinations of malware customized for local markets, phishing and social engineering attacks as well increasing e-commerce and ATM fraud, businesses are increasingly at risk for payment data theft.
Singapore’s cards and payments market is one of the most competitive and attractive in the Asia-Pacific region. In fact, sixty-nine percent of consumer spending in Singapore is made through electronic payments.
It’s against this backdrop that global payment and cybersecurity experts met at the PCI Asia-Pacific Community Meeting last week in Singapore to collaborate on helping businesses prevent, detect and respond to cyberattacks that can lead to payment data breaches and fraud.
“We simply must work together to advance payment security,” says PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) International Director Jeremy King told attendees.
“New technologies are driving adoption of cashless, mobile and digital commerce in Singapore and the Asia-Pacific region, and it’s critical that we ensure consumers remain confident in the security of their financial information with every payment transaction. As payments evolve, businesses must prioritize data protection with robust security standards and practices.”
The PCI SSC, meeting in Singapore, reinforced its mission to foster secure transactions globally and emphasized that as new cyber threats emerge, and advances in technology change the way payments are conducted, PCI Standards will evolve to protect the next generation of payments.
Regional and industry experts speaking at the event included representatives from the PCI Security Standards Council, INTERPOL, Verizon, Diners Club Singapore, Foregenix, Beijing Information Technology Co., Ltd., and Pen Test Partners, LLP. Presentations and discussions addressed a mix of regional and global topics ranging from new threats via the Internet of Things; cybersecurity trends in Asia-Pacific; Point-to-Point Encryption for protecting payment data throughout the entire processing environment; preventing skimming at ATMs and the future of mobile and digital commerce.
Highlighting the PCI SSC’s 10-year anniversary, PCI SSC General Manager Stephen Orfei said, “The Asia-Pacific region has made tremendous advances in payment security in the past decade. More and more companies in the region are making cybersecurity a top priority. With the rapid growth in mobile payments, now, more than ever, we must join forces to devalue payment data and make it useless to criminals. It is very encouraging to see industry and public-private partnerships in Asia-Pacific working together to address the ever expanding cyber threats from around the world.”
More and more solution providers in Asia-Pacific are encouraged to adopt the PCI Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE) Standard to provide solutions that devalue data and simplify security and PCI DSS compliance efforts for businesses.
The PCI SSC Small Merchant Task Force urged banks, technology providers and security assessors with small business customers to adopt and disseminate newly published PCI Payment Protection Resources for Small Merchants.