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Mastercard Cybersecurity Portfolio

  • Updated

Our Role in Securing the Digital Ecosystem

Mastercard plays a central role in strengthening trust across the digital ecosystem by helping organizations proactively identify cyber risks, validate their defenses, and enhance their overall resilience. This includes evaluating cybersecurity maturity to reveal capability gaps, simulating real‑world threat scenarios to test the effectiveness of existing controls, analyzing the evolving threat landscape to understand adversary intent and exposure, and preparing teams for high‑pressure incidents through realistic cyber crisis exercises. Together, these objectives enable organizations to strengthen their security posture, prioritize improvements, and confidently operate in an increasingly complex digital environment.

Here are the core solutions that enable these objectives:  

  • Risk and Resilience
    • Cyber Quant (CQ): Assesses an organization’s cybersecurity maturity and quantifies its cyber risk to prioritize the most impactful improvements.
    • Cyber Front (CF): Simulates real‑world attack techniques to validate whether existing security controls can detect, prevent, and respond to actual threats.
    • Cyber Crisis Exercise (CCX): Runs realistic incident scenarios to test and improve how teams make decisions, communicate, and respond during high‑pressure cyber events.
    • Cyber Insights (CI): Delivers strategic threat intelligence to reveal which adversaries, attack methods, and trends pose the greatest risk to an organization.
  • RiskRecon (RR): Continuously evaluates the external cybersecurity posture of third‑party vendors to identify vulnerabilities that could impact the organization.
  • Threat Protection (TP): Protects digital assets with cloud‑native web application security, mitigating threats such as DDoS attacks, bot activity, and malicious traffic using the Baffin Bay threat protection engine.

Cyber Quant

Cyber Quant is Mastercard’s platform for evaluating an organization’s cybersecurity maturity and quantifying cyber risk in financial terms. It measures the effectiveness of controls; benchmarks posture against global frameworks and identifies the top risks that could have the greatest business impact.

Business Value

  • Reveals the organization’s true cybersecurity maturity across people, processes, and technology.
  • Provides financial quantification to demonstrate the impact of cyber risks to business leaders.
  • Prioritizes improvements based on highest reduction of risk per investment.
  • Supports compliance with major standards (NIST CSF 2.0, ISO 27001, CIS Controls, etc.).

For further insight into Cyber Quant, please see this article.

Cyber Front

Cyber Front is Mastercard’s unified security validation platform that continuously tests, measures, and improves an organization’s cyber‑resilience across three complementary modules: 

  • Security Control Validation (SCV)
  • Attack Path Validation (APV)
  • Attack Surface Validation (ASV)

It safely simulates real attacker behaviors across the full kill chain to show whether security controls, configurations, and processes would prevent, detect, and contain modern threats.

Cyber Front Attack Security Control Validation

Cyber Front Security Control Validation (SCV) is a capability designed to continuously test how effectively an organization’s security controls prevent and detect real‑world cyber threats. By safely simulating known attack techniques across endpoint, network, email, and data protection layers, SCV evaluates control performance without disrupting production systems. These automated simulations provide a realistic view of how defenses behave across multiple stages of an attack, helping teams understand what is blocked, what is detected, and where visibility may be lacking.
 
For further insight into Cyber Front SCV, please see this article.

Cyber Front Attack Path Validation

Cyber Front Attack Path Validation (APV) simulates realistic, multi‑stage attack scenarios to show how an attacker could move through an organization’s environment after initial access, without disrupting operations. Using lightweight agents that emulate attacker tactics such as lateral movement, credential harvesting, and privilege escalation, APV visualizes the most likely paths to critical assets. This allows organizations to validate whether existing controls can detect or stop advanced threats, identify blind spots, and prioritize remediation to reduce exposure and limit the potential blast radius of a breach.
 
For further insight into Cyber Front APV, please see this article.

Cyber Front Attack Surface Validation

Cyber Front Attack Surface Validation (ASV) provides continuous visibility into an organization’s internal and external cyber assets by automatically discovering, inventorying, and classifying them in a single, unified view. By consolidating asset data, vulnerability information, and exposure context, ASV ensures security teams always have an up‑to‑date understanding of their evolving environment.

ASV helps reduce risk by prioritizing vulnerabilities based on exploitability, threat relevance, and business impact rather than sheer volume. With real‑time insight into exposure, hygiene gaps, and misconfigurations, teams can focus remediation efforts on what matters most and proactively strengthen overall security posture.

For further insight into Cyber Front ASV, please see this article.

Business Value

  • Helps identify exploitable security gaps and misconfigurations before they lead to real cyber incidents.
  • Continuously validates that existing security controls can prevent, detect, and respond to real‑world attacks.
  • Prioritizes remediation based on realistic attack scenarios rather than static vulnerability lists.
  • Improves cyber resilience while reducing reliance on periodic penetration testing and manual assessments.

Cyber Crisis Exercise

Cyber Crisis Exercise is Mastercard’s simulation-based training environment that tests how people, processes, and leadership teams respond to high‑pressure cyber incidents.
 
By practicing in a controlled environment, organizations can identify gaps in processes, roles, and communication flows before a real crisis occurs. These exercises build confidence and muscle memory, helping teams respond faster, limit business impact, and recover operations more effectively during an actual cyber event.

Business Value

  • Identifies gaps in incident response, communication flow, and stakeholder alignment.
  • Strengthens readiness of security, IT, legal, communications, and executive teams.
  • Improves coordination across the organization under time‑sensitive pressure.
  • Provides measurable performance insights to guide upskilling and playbook enhancement.

For further insight into Cyber Crisis Exercise, please see this training.

Cyber Insights

Cyber Insights is Mastercard’s strategic threat intelligence platform that provides visibility into the adversaries, attack methods, and trends most relevant to your organization.
 
By forecasting how threats are likely to evolve and where future attacks may originate, Cyber Insights helps organizations make more informed security decisions. The intelligence enables teams to prioritize controls, guide security investments, and strengthen overall cyber resilience against emerging and contextual threats.

Business Value

  • Enables proactive decision‑making with forecasted threat insights.
  • Helps align security controls and investments with real attacker behaviors.
  • Enhances risk assessments by incorporating contextual threat intelligence.
  • Reduces uncertainty by identifying future risks before they materialize.

For further insight into Cyber Insights, please see this article.

RiskRecon

RiskRecon is Mastercard’s continuous third‑party cyber risk monitoring platform. It analyzes the external security posture of your vendors, partners, and your own public‑facing systems using automated scanning and security scoring.

By highlighting high‑risk vendors and prioritizing remediation efforts, RiskRecon helps organizations reduce exposure and prevent supply‑chain‑driven incidents.
 

Business Value

  • Helps identify high‑risk vendors early through deep visibility into their internet‑facing attack surface.
  • Reduces manual third‑party questionnaires and assessment workload through automated risk assessments.
  • Provides accurate, risk‑prioritized scoring aligned to your organization’s specific risk appetite.
  • Strengthens supply‑chain resilience with continuous, automated monitoring across third‑ and extended vendor ecosystems.

For further insight into RiskRecon, please visit this site.

Threat Protection

Threat Protection is Mastercard’s cloud‑based platform that filters and cleans internet traffic to protect your applications from DDoS attacks, malicious bots, and web application exploits. Traffic is routed through global Threat Protection Centers, ensuring only safe traffic reaches your systems.

Business Value

  • Ensures uptime by mitigating DDoS attacks instantly through cloud‑based scrubbing.
  • Blocks malicious bots while allowing legitimate bots like search engines to pass through.
  • Protects web applications from intrusions and exploits with advanced Layer‑7 inspection.
  • Reduces hardware cost, complexity, and deployment time (live in minutes).
  • Works with on‑prem, private cloud, and public cloud environments.

For further insight into Threat Protection, please visit this site.
 

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