Mastercard Inc (MA) Fights Thousands Of Hacking Attempts Daily: CEO Ajay Banga

Mastercard Inc (NYSE:MA) fends off cyber-attacks on a daily basis, the company’s CEO, Ajay Banga, revealed in an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer and David Faber.

The Mastercard Inc (NYSE:MA) boss said that his company spends a great deal of effort, money and energy to deal with cyber-attacks.

“I also chair the Business Roundtable group on cyber security and information technologies so I can speak from broader than my business. It’s a real, present danger. It exists,” Banga said.

He said at a later point in the interview that Mastercard Inc (NYSE:MA) and other companies are only as safe as they are in the current second when they are still not broken into.

“There are groups of people who are [always] attempting to break into data troves and to companies. Forty-something percent of companies in the last year had been broken into in some way or another. Our company has thousands of attempts a day to get to our data,” he said.

The comment from Banga, the leader of Mastercard Inc (NYSE:MA), one of the stocks Warren Buffett and other billionaire institutional investors are crazy about, comes after Cramer and Faber expressed how concerned they are about cyber security.

Meanwhile, Banga also expressed in the interview his confidence about the security level of Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s Apple Pay system. He said that one of the features of the system is its use of another sequence of numbers that are not a credit card number for a transaction being processed. This would make it harder for criminals to steal a card number through the Apple Pay system.

Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global held about 9.82 million shares of Mastercard Inc (NYSE:MA) by the end of the second quarter.