Mastercard's Recorded Future Deal Furthers AI Security Goals

Mastercard's $2.

65 billion deal to acquire the threat intelligence provider will boost the credit-card company's AI-based cybersecurity protection capabilities.
The largest credit-card providers have made sizeable investments in advanced cybersecurity capabilities in recent years, but Mastercard is upping the ante with last week's agreement to buy Recorded Future from Insight Partners for $2.

65 billion.

The deal, scheduled to close in the first quarter of 2025, would mark the second-largest acquisition in Mastercard's 58-year history. The price tag also nearly equals the $3 billion Mastercard is estimated to have previously spent on nine cybersecurity-related companies since launching its cybersecurity business unit in 2017, Strategy of Security analyst Cole Grolmus wrote on LinkedIn.

Recorded Future says it has 1,900 customers worldwide, including governments and half of the Fortune 100. According to a recent Frost & Sullivan report, the Recorded Future Intelligence Cloud hosts one of the largest threat repositories in the world. Recorded Future's Collective Insights integrates broadly with governance, risk, and compliance; third-party risk management; attack surface management; and other analytics tools, a May 2024 Forrester Research report noted."Combining Recorded Future's threat intelligence capabilities with Mastercard's extensive insight and knowledge of and partnership with merchants and financial institutions should provide greater protection to digital payment transactions," says Forrester principal research analyst Brian Wrozek. "This also gives Mastercard more direct control over a critical cybersecurity capability: threat intelligence."Last year, Recorded Future added OpenAI's GPT model to the threat intelligence platform to enhance its real-time analytics capabilities. Using the pretrained transformer model, Recorded Future AI includes 10 years of threat analysis from its Insikt Group threat research subsidiary, which is integrated with the Recorded Future Intelligence Graph.

Expanding Threat Intelligence Capabilities
Mastercard has been investing in threat and risk intelligence capabilities for over a decade. In 2014, Mastercard launched SafetyNet, a tool to detect risks based on activity throughout its network. SafetyNet thwarted $20 billion in fraud attempts directed at its network in 2023, says Johan Gerber, Mastercard's EVP of security solutions.