08/07/2025

BIZ & FINANCE TUESDAY | JULY 8, 2025

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Visa’s war room takes on cybercriminals o US$15 trillion flows through payments giant’s networks every year

Jabbara said the sophistication extends to corporate-style management Some criminal organisations now employ chief risk officers who determine operational risk appetite. They might decide that targeting government infrastructure and hospitals generates an excessive amount of attention from law enforcement and is too risky to pursue. To combat these unprecedented threats, Jabbara leads a payment scam disruption team focused on understanding criminal methodologies. From a small room called the Risk Operations Centre in Virginia, employees analyse data streams on multiple screens, searching for patterns that distinguish fraudulent activity from legitimate credit card use. In the larger Cyber Fusion Centre, staff monitor potential cyberattacks targeting Visa’s own infrastructure around the clock. “We deal with millions of attacks across different parts of our network,” Jabbara noted, emphasising that most are handled automatically without human intervention. Visa maintains identical facilities in London and Singapore, ensuring 24-hour global vigilance. – AFP UK house prices stagnated in June LONDON: British house prices stagnated month-on-month in June, as economists polled by Reuters had expected, figures from Halifax showed yesterday. The mortgage lender revised up May’s reading to show a 0.3% drop rather than a 0.4% drop. The data underlined the subdued state of Britain’s housing market following an increase in tax on property transactions that took effect in April. House prices on Halifax’s measure are now down slightly compared with their level at the end of last year. Amanda Bryden, Halifax’s head of mortgages, said the housing market still showed resilience, helped by rising wages. “With markets pricing in two more rate cuts from the Bank of England by year end, and the average rate on newly drawn mortgages now at its lowest since 2023, we continue to expect modest house price growth in the second half of the year,” Bryden added. Halifax said house prices were 2.5% higher on the year during June, down slightly from May’s reading of 2.6%. – Reuters Aussie job ads jump to one-year high SYDNEY: Australian job advertisements jumped in June to the highest in 12 months, driven by solid gains in the private sector, suggesting the labour market remains resilient amid lower interest rates. Data from Australia and New Zealand Banking Group and employment website Indeed showed the number of job ads rose 1.8% in June from May, when they fell an upwardly revised 0.6%. Vacancies in the private sector gained 3.2%. Job ads in June were just 0.4% lower from a year earlier, and remained 16.1% higher than pre-pandemic levels. “Given the ongoing tightness in Australia’s labour market and the overall resilience in its economy, we maintain our expectation that this easing cycle will be relatively shallow,” said Aaron Luk, an economist at ANZ. “We expect the Reserve Bank of Australia to cut the cash rate by 25bp in its July and August meetings.” – Reuters

information, they automatically distribute it across numerous merchant websites that generate small recurring charges – amounts low enough that victims may not notice for months. Some of these operations increasingly resemble legitimate tech companies, offering services and digital products to fraudsters much like Google or Microsoft cater to businesses. On the dark web, criminals can purchase comprehensive fraud toolkits. “You can buy the software. You can buy a tutorial on how to use the software. You can get access to a mule network on the ground or you can get access to a bot network” to carry out denial-of-service attacks that overwhelm servers with traffic, effectively shutting them down, Jabbara said. Just as cloud computing lowered barriers for startups by eliminating the need to build servers, “the same type of trend has happened in the cyber crime and fraud space”, he said. These off-the-shelf services can also enable bad actors to launch brute force attacks on an industrial scale – using repeated payment attempts to crack a card’s number, expiry date, and security code.

hundreds of millions of dollars annually from fraud and scam activities,” Michael Jabbara, Visa’s global head of fraud solutions, told AFP during a tour of the company’s security campus. “These organisations are very structured in how they operate.” The best-resourced criminal syndicates now focus on scams that directly target consumers, enticing them into purchases or transactions by manipulating their emotions. “Consumers are continuously vulnerable. They can be exploited, and that’s where we’ve seen a much higher incidence of attacks recently,” Jabbara said. The warning signs are clear: anything that seems too good to be true online is suspicious, and romance opportunities with strangers from distant countries are especially dangerous. “What you don’t realise is that the person you’re chatting with is more likely than not in a place like Myanmar,” Jabbara warned. He said human-trafficking victims are forced to work in multi-billion-dollar cyber scam centres built by Asian crime networks in Myanmar’s lawless border regions. The most up-to-date fraud techniques are systematic and quietly devastating. Once criminals obtain your card

ASHBURN: In the heart of Data Centre Alley – a patch of suburban Washington where much of the world’s internet traffic flows – Visa operates its global fraud command centre. The numbers that the payments giant grapples with are enormous. Every year, US$15 trillion (RM64 trillion) flows through Visa’s networks, representing roughly 15% of the world’s economy. And bad actors constantly try to syphon off some of that money. Modern fraudsters vary dramatically in sophistication. To stay ahead, Visa has invested US$12 billion over the past five years building AI-powered cyber fraud detection capabilities, knowing that criminals are also spending big. “You have everybody from a single individual threat actor looking to make a quick buck all the way to really corporatised criminal organisations that generate tens or

An oil tanker is being loaded at Saudi Aramco’s Ras Tanura oil refinery and terminal in Saudi Arabia. – REUTERSPIC

Oil falls as Opec+ hikes output more than expected SINGAPORE: Oil prices slipped yesterday after Opec+ surprised markets by hiking output more than expected in August, while uncertainty over US tariffs and their potential impact on global economic growth weighed on demand expectations. market share and some tolerance for the resulting decline in price and revenue,” Tim Evans of Evans Energy said in a note. The August increase is a jump from monthly increases of 411,000 bpd Opec + had approved for May, June and July, and 138,000 bpd in April. flagship Arab Light crude to a four-month high for Asia. Goldman analysts expect Opec + to announce a final 550,000 bpd increase for September at the next meeting on Aug 3.

Oil also came under pressure as US officials flagged a delay on when tariffs would begin but failed to provide details on changes to the rates that will be imposed. Investors are worried higher tariff rates could slow economic activity which would reduce demand for oil. “Concerns over (US President Donald) Trump’s tariffs continue to be the broad theme in the second half of 2025, with dollar weakness the only support for oil for now,” said Priyanka Sachdeva, a senior market analyst at Phillip Nova. – Reuters

Brent crude futures fell 24 cents, or 0.35%, to US$68.06 a barrel by 0642 GMT (2.42pm in Malaysia), while US West Texas Intermediate crude was at US$66.31, down 69 cents, or 1.03%. The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and their allies, a group known as Opec +, agreed on Saturday to raise production by 548,000 barrels per day in August. “The increased production clearly represents a more aggressive competition for

The decision will bring nearly 80% of the 2.2 million bpd voluntary cuts from eight Opec producers back into the market, RBC Capital analysts led by Helima Croft said in a note. However, the actual output increase has been smaller than planned so far and most of the supply has been from Saudi Arabia, they added. In a show of confidence in oil demand, Saudi Arabia on Sunday raised the August price for its