Visa and FireEye have launched a new cyber intelligence service tailored for the payments industry and designed to help identify and respond to attacks on systems.

Visa Threat Intelligence, powered by FireEye, is the first product launched as part of the new strategic partnership between the two.

The service will be made available later this year, and will provide subscribers access to a web portal that filters the latest relevant cyber intelligence into actionable information.

This will include timely alerts on malicious actors, methods, trends in cyber-attacks, and in-depth forensic analysis from recent data beaches, says Visa.

“Each week, merchants and card issuers receive thousands of alerts about possible cyber-attacks, making it difficult to know which ones to focus on,” says Mark Nelsen, Visa senior vice president of risk products and business intelligence.

“Visa Threat Intelligence removes the noise by assessing hundreds of threat indicators and serving up the most important and timely information.

“Users can then isolate and address those threats that are the most pressing and potentially damaging to their business and customers,” he says.

More sophisticated users can also take advantage of APIs to automatically feed threat indicator data into their own security systems, the company says.

A premium offering will grant access to advanced tools, powered by FireEye Multi-Vector Virtual Execution (MVX) technology. This will analyse and isolate malicious indicators from malware to identify suspicious activity from IP addresses and domains.

In addition, Visa Threat Intelligence will provide a secure platform where clients can opt to form communities and safely exchange real-time threat intelligence.

Leveraging community-based intelligence is crucial to a comprehensive defence strategy because many attack groups run campaigns that target organisations with a similar profile, Visa says.

“Attack groups are exceptionally skilled at executing an attack across multiple organisations, identifying successful techniques and scaling those methods to an entire industry,” says Grady Summers, FireEye SVP and chief technology officer.

“By partnering with Visa, we can provide targeted intelligence to the payments industry to combat the economies of scale that attackers employ, and help create a community united in a common defence,” he says.

As noted in the latest FireEye M-Trends report, the payments industry continues to be an attractive target for cyber criminals as attackers find new ways to steal credit card numbers from point-of-sale (POS) systems.

Through this global strategic relationship, Visa and FireEye are looking at ways to empower merchants, issuers, and other payments players with the technologies, intelligence and expertise to protect their organisations.

In early 2016, the partnership is expected to roll out additional solutions to identify malicious communications and recommend remediation steps based on activity in the network as well as infection rates across the network.