The new service was showcased this week at the Mastercard Cybersecurity Summit held in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Cyber criminals are persistent in their efforts to exploit weaknesses in authorization systems. According to the Boston Consulting Group, cyberattacks hit financial services firms 300 times more often than companies in other industries.

As the number of cyberattacks increases, Mastercard has said that implementing fraud technology tools may not be enough to mitigate the risk.

However, the newly announced Threat Scan service complements an issuer’s existing fraud tools by proactively imitating known criminal transaction behaviour to assess their authorization system responses before exploitation and fraud loss can occur.

Johan Gerber, executive vice president, security and cyber innovation, said: “Our customers increasingly rely on us to provide solutions that help make their systems safer and more secure. Threat Scan enables our customers to stay one step ahead, act faster and minimize the risks that expose them to attacks. As cyberattacks grow in scale and sophistication, it is critical that we advance trust in our payments system.”

The new service works by utilising an evolving array of test scenarios from Mastercard global insights into criminal behaviours to simulate known fraudulent attacks on issuers and pinpoints authorization security weaknesses.

As cyber criminals identify new ways to gain access into a system, the scenarios can be added to the range of tests and instantly ran against systems globally.

When the scan is completed, issuers will see the results immediately in the Threat Scan application report pane.

The resulting insights enable issuers to assess their fraud exposure and take targeted actions that shore up the weakest links in their defences before fraud occurs.

Mr Gerber added: “Threat Scan is part of our multi-layered security strategy to secure the payments ecosystem. Customers who participated in our pilot told us they gained valuable insights into how to secure their authorization systems against future attacks. Many were surprised by what we found.”