Global Payments Reduces Third-party Risk With Dataminr Pulse

Real-time information, Cybersecurity

Global Payments VP of Cyber Security Operations Mike Kane shared how he and his team use Dataminr Pulse to meet their cybersecurity needs during a panel discussion at RSA Conference 2024—and during a one-on-one conversation with Dataminr. Below is an excerpt.

About Global Payments:

A worldwide financial and payments technology company
Six decades of innovation in the payment space
Works with 4.6M merchant accounts; 4,000 tech partners; 1,500 financial institutions and 100+ industries
Dataminr customer since 2022

Global Payments first became aware of Dataminr Pulse because of its physical security capabilities. In one instance, Dataminr alerted on a shooting incident near the organization’s headquarters. The security team learned of the event 30 minutes before the media reported on it—allowing Global Payments to keep their executives safe.

When it realized how much more Dataminr Pulse offered, Global Payments began using Dataminr’s cyber alerting capabilities.

“When we learned that they [Dataminr] had a cyber component of that, where we could learn about threats, vulnerabilities and things like that ahead of time, we opened the door and became a customer. We’ve been with Dataminr for about three years now,” said Mike Kane, VP of Cyber Security Operations at Global Payments.

Kane shared this at the RSA Conference 2024 and went on to explain other ways Dataminr is helping his team mitigate cyber risks more effectively—from protecting against cyber-physical threats to managing third-party risks.

Watch On-demand Webinar: Mitigating Third-party Risk in the Age of Mass Zero-day Exploitation

The challenge of reducing exposure to third-party risk

Managing third-party risk has become a growing challenge for organizations everywhere.

“I have the opportunity to meet with large companies in nearly every sector. And when I get together with groups of the largest banks, the largest airlines, the number one issue that they raise is third-party risk,” said Brandon Wales, Executive Director at U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

As a global commerce platform that serves and partners with numerous businesses and industries, Global Payments is especially susceptible to third-party cyber risk. It’s imperative that “our third-party suppliers tell us when they have a problem before we find out that they have a problem,” said Kane. “It’s a scary thing. It’s what keeps us up at night.”

In particular, zero-day vulnerabilities and leaked credentials on the dark web—whether they pertain to Global Payments, its third-party vendors or one of its 25-plus subsidiaries—are of the biggest concerns for Kane and his team. They needed to build a robust threat intelligence system that would notify them as soon as a risk emerges.

The solution for better visibility into third-party risk

Once Kane and his team integrated Dataminr Pulse into their cyber threat intelligence platform, they were better able to identify vulnerabilities as they occurred—giving them the lead time needed to, as Kane puts it, “prevent a catastrophic event.”

“Dataminr is very centric to [our threat intelligence] in which we’re monitoring our third-party supply chain and looking for anything that’s hitting social media, news cycles, whatever it happens to be,” said Kane. “We’re notifying third-party suppliers that they’ve got a problem before they know that they have a problem.”

Now that Kane and his team have full visibility into their cyber risk exposure, they can swiftly take the right course of action when a critical incident occurs. This includes notifying key stakeholders within and outside of the organization so that each team can activate its response plans in a timely manner.

“It’s the speed at which we’re able to identify and say, yes, this is relevant, or no, this is not relevant. And notify the people that need to know,” said Kane.

Additionally, Kane has found Dataminr’s ReGenAI—a new form of generative AI—highly valuable and effective in helping his team maintain situational awareness and understanding of cyber risks. This is due to the ReGenAI’s ability to distill multidimensional events into concise briefs that dynamically update in real time, enabling Kane and his team to gain rapid understanding of risks and events as they unfold.

Watch Video: The Power of Dataminr’s ReGenAI

“[Dataminr’s ReGenAI] makes Dataminr Pulse more of an asset to us because we’re able to say, ‘I just saw this in three different places. Let me give you a briefing of that. Also, we saw this a couple of months ago and here’s what we did about that, or here’s what was said about that,’” said Kane. “Bringing all of that together gives us a truer picture.”