It's a collaboration that might best be described as a marriage of social media and payments: Libra, a cryptocurrency being created by Facebook and a team that includes Mastercard, Visa and PayPal. Facebook is also readying a digital wallet, called Calibra that businesses and consumers can use to store Libras. The wallet will be available as a standalone smartphone app, as well as a button within Facebook Messenger and What'sApp, Facebook revealed.

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As consumers share everything from restaurant dinners to dental visits on social media, security advocates recommend updating privacy settings on mobile apps and social media platforms. Failure to do so may expose more details than most users would want to share, experts warn. In a June 16, 2019, blog post titled “Millions of Venmo transactions scraped in warning over privacy settings,” TechCrunch security editor Zach Whittaker reported that hacktivist Dan Salmon uploaded 7 million Venmo transactions to GitHub, primarily as a consumer wake-up call.

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U.S. merchant acquirers and processors are reacting to the June 7, 2019, decision by the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Western District of Tennessee, which held First Data Corp. liable for damages stemming from two data breaches at Spec's Family Partners Ltd., a liquor store chain and First Data merchant. The unanimous decision by District Court Judges Batchelder, Cook and Kethledge, found that even though Spec's had failed to comply with PCI security standards, which left its stores vulnerable to hackers, First Data's decision to freeze millions of dollars in credit card receivables violated the terms of the merchant's processing agreement.

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EMVCo recently released EMV Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) Specification v1.0. The specification "provides a foundation that will enable the processing of ecommerce transactions in a consistent, streamlined fashion across a variety of digital channels and devices,” EMVCo wrote in a statement about the release. Heralding the release, Karteek Patel, chair of EMVCo’s Executive Committee, said, “The continued growth of global ecommerce requires reinforcing consumer convenience and confidence in payments.” He noted that EMV SRC can deliver this while supporting the evolving habits of consumers as they migrate their shopping to PCs/laptops, mobile devices and other connected devices of the present and future.

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2018 was a record year for online fraud, according to the 2019 Internet Security Threat Report, published by Symantec in February 2019. Massive, automated attacks on ecommerce shopping carts, designed to imitate legitimate hand-offs to secure checkout sites, robbed consumers of credit card credentials and personally identifiable information, according to the report. Speculating that devalued cryptocurrencies may be fueling the growth of web skimming and formjacking attack vectors, researchers said the "value of stolen credit card details on the cyber underground is probably more assured than the value of cryptocurrencies in the current climate."

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Lazlo 326 LLC, a fintech startup, received a patent for a new way of sharing, validating and redeeming stored-value products online and at the POS. The core patent, issued June 6, 2019, covers the company’s Crypto Imaging technology, which enables service providers to embed electronic coupons, tickets and rewards directly into videos, memes and GIFs. These fully digital products can be transmitted by text and easily loaded onto connected devices, eliminating the need for physical cards and tickets, according to the company.

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Americans prefer to use credit cards for recurring payments—more than consumers in almost every leading industrialized country, save Canada. A growing number of Americans, however, would consider paying with direct debits to their bank accounts, according to a new survey from GoCardless and YouGov.com. But here’s the catch: all of the top 30 subscription-based services in the United States offer credit and debit card payments, 53 percent offer PayPal, and 6 percent offer other payment methods. But none offer direct debits as an option for recurring payments, according to Hiroki Takeuchi, CEO of GoCardless. That includes Amazon Prime, iCloud and Netflix.

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In the wake of new and pervasive malware intrusions and distributed denial-of-service attacks against supply chains and large data repositories, local and federal jurisdictions in North America are proposing stronger enforcement of existing laws and enacting new legislation to impose more severe consequences on parties that alter and steal data. Meanwhile, security analysts are urging service providers and merchants to improve security practices and response times.

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