New Zealand To Adopt New Ecommerce Security Requirement To Counter Cybercrime

AUCKLAND, August 22, 2022 –Today, Visa, a world leader in digital payments, announced a new ecommerce security requirement to help businesses fight a rising form of cybercrime as part of its new Security Roadmap for New Zealand.

With more than half (58%) of retail businesses across the country now selling online, merchants are facing a growing threat of enumeration attacks, a criminal practice where fraudsters use automation to test and guess payment credentials such as Primary Account Number (PAN), card verification value (CVV2) and expiration dates, which can then be used in fraudulent transactions. It is the increasing use of botnets – which are networks of hijacked computer devices – that are being used to carry out and scale these attacks.

To help businesses counter the threat, Visa has introduced a requirement for ecommerce payment providers to invest in capabilities that identify and prevent enumeration attacks. By October 2023, providers must ensure they have advanced controls in place. These tools can range from scanning features that look for anomalies in shopping cart data; account blocking after a certain number of login attempts; restricting the number of transactions that can be processed by the merchant from a single card per minute; and CAPTCHAs, which are tasks that are designed to be easy for humans and difficult for bots.

"New Zealand is among the first countries globally in which we are rolling out this ecommerce security requirement,” said Joe Cunningham, Visa’s Head of Risk for Asia Pacific. “Protecting businesses from harmful cyber-attacks is vital in today’s digital economy and this is a whole of ecosystem effort. We will work together with a seller’s acquiring bank or payments gateway to ensure that the entity closest to their online checkout page has the right controls in place,” he said.

The industry requirement comes as new research commissioned by Visa and conducted by YouGov, showed more than half (56%) of Kiwis have abandoned a purchase they were making online, with the top reason (22%) relating to concerns that the transaction wasn’t secure.

"Ecommerce is increasingly popular, and security must continue to evolve for a digital-first world. For businesses looking to grow, investing in online security capabilities is crucial to defend against attacks that could take them offline, potentially harm their brand and impact customer trust,” added Anthony Watson, Visa’s Country Manager, New Zealand and South Pacific.

With a global team of over 1000 cybersecurity specialists, Visa provides 24/7, real-time fraud detection and mitigation, analysing millions of transactions every day for known and emerging threats. Visa’s artificial Intelligence (AI) powered technology is able to spot patterns in data otherwise undetectable by humans to identify enumeration patterns and alert affected financial institutions and merchants before fraudulent transactions begin.

In fact, Visa’s AI solution, Visa Advanced Authorisation, recently helped financial institutions to prevent nearly $88 million in fraud from impacting New Zealand businesses over a 12-month period.

Visa’s Security Roadmap outlines the steps Visa will be taking across six key areas to continue to secure digital commerce ecosystem in New Zealand, including:

1. Driving adoption of secure technologies, such as EMV 3-D Secure (3DS) and Tokenisation
2. Securing digital first payment experiences
3. Ensuring ecosystem resilience
4. Preventing enumeration attacks
5. Enhancing the cybersecurity posture of ecosystem participants
6. Preventing New Zealand consumers and businesses from becoming victims of scams

Visa continues to publish up to date best practices for merchants on what they can do to guard against cybercrime, as well as guidance on what issuers of Visa credentials can do to reduce the impact of enumeration.

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