How are Mastercard and Cloudfare Fighting Cyber Threats?

The financial services sector is facing an unprecedented wave of AI-driven cyber threats, and payment processing giant Mastercard is responding with a strategic partnership.

The company has joined forces with Cloudflare, a leading connectivity cloud provider, to develop advanced cyber defence tools that could help protect vulnerable organisations across the financial ecosystem.

For financial institutions, small businesses and payment processors, the partnership could mean access to enterprise-grade security without the traditional costs and complexity.

The collaboration brings together Mastercard's threat intelligence capabilities with Cloudflare's application security portfolio, creating a unified defence system designed specifically for organisations that handle financial transactions and sensitive payment data.

“For small businesses, critical infrastructure and governments, a cyberattack is more than a technical hurdle. It is an existential threat,” says Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudflare.

Stephanie continues: “Often considered 'target rich but resource poor,' these organisations are strategic targets and are often attacked at a greater rate than global enterprise or Fortune 500 organisations.

“This partnership brings together the best in cyber defence so that these underserved organisations do not fall victim to the growing number of cyberattacks.”

Addressing vulnerabilities in financial infrastructure

The financial services industry operates on a complex web of interconnected systems, many of which rely on legacy infrastructure.

Small businesses face additional risks as new vendors and outsourced services are layered into their environments. In addition to shadow IT and legacy systems, security teams face complex pieces of a layered puzzle that mean the attack surface becomes unknown. 

According to the partnership's framework, these vulnerabilities could be addressed through comprehensive visibility and monitoring tools.

Mastercard's Recorded Future and RiskRecon platforms offer attack surface monitoring capabilities that, when combined with Cloudflare's security portfolio, could help financial organisations identify and close security gaps before they are exploited.

“Improving critical infrastructure cybersecurity and reducing cyber risk is an ongoing, challenging mission,” says Dan Cimpean, Director of the Romanian National Cyber Security Directorate.

“As society and global economies increasingly rely on digital networks, we must combine our efforts across the public and private sectors, across nations and international organisations, to build resilience and prevent cyber incidents.

“The protection of critical infrastructure is and must be a joint effort.”

Unified security for payment ecosystems

The collaboration between Mastercard and Cloudflare centres on three key security capabilities designed to protect financial transactions and payment infrastructure.

The first addresses blind spots in security coverage, with Recorded Future identifying unprotected internet-facing assets whilst Cloudflare's application security can immediately secure any shadow assets handling payment data.

The partnership also provides organisations with a real-time view of their cyber posture through Recorded Future's threat intelligence, which assigns security ratings from A to F.

These ratings can be visualised through Cloudflare's Security Insights dashboard, where threats are prioritised based on their potential impact on financial operations.

Finally, the unified solution translates identified risks into active protection.

Organisations can mitigate vulnerabilities through web application firewalls, encryption or automated defences via the Cloudflare dashboard, ensuring payment systems remain secure without requiring extensive technical expertise.

“With small businesses accounting for about half of the world's GDP, closing the resilience gap is critical to securing the foundation of our global economy,” says Johan Gerber, Global Head of Security Solutions at Mastercard, in a statement.

“Our collaboration with Cloudflare propels our mission to secure the digital ecosystem in partnership with governments and other key players, empowering businesses to focus on what matters most: their productivity and growth.”