Mastercard is buying Recorded Future for $2.6 billion from investment firm Insight Partners. With this, the credit card company further expands its portfolio of risk management, cybersecurity and threat intelligence expertise.
With the acquisition of Recorded Future, Mastercard gains one of the largest threat intelligence parties in the world. The company operates in 75 countries and is a government provider in 45 countries.
According to the credit card company, having holistic and global cyber security is an absolute necessity these days. For this, the acquisition of Recorded Futrure provides Mastercard with the insights and information to provide for securing today’s digital economy. Not only for the payment ecosystem, but also beyond.
Visibility into threats
For this, the cybersecurity and threat intelligence specialist offers, among other things, real-time visibility into potential threats by analyzing many data sources for insights. These insights should help customers address and resolve potential risks.
The AI technology used by Recorded Future for this purpose will be combined at a later stage with the various related services already available to Mastercard. This should eventually enhance the comprehensive treath intelligence capabilities the credit card company offers its network of participating vendors and financial companies.
The two companies already work together in the area of threat intelligence. To this end, they offer an AI service that gives financial companies an alert when a credit card in use may have been compromised.
Previous acquisitions
After the acquisition, expected by the end of this year, Recorded Future will continue to operate under its own name.
The acquisition is not the first Mastercard has made in the security field in recent years. In 2019, it acquired digital fraud specialist Ethoca. This was followed in 2020 by RiskRecon, which, as its name suggests, specializes in risk management. In 2021, CipherTrace and Ekata were acquired in a single year, each active in different playing fields within security.
Also read: ‘Digital wallets susceptible to stolen credit card fraud’