Digital businesses are offering innovative services and products to differentiate their services as well as to build and strengthen customer relationships. Customers must log-in to several online accounts to access different services/products. In the process, they leave behind digital footprints in the form of personally identifiable information. Fraudsters harvest this information and use it for many frauds including account takeover—also known as credential stuffing, brute forcing, and account hijacking.
ATO is Becoming More Prevalent
As more and more customers require accounts to access online services or make a purchase, the focus on account takeover is growing. The Arkose Labs Q4 Fraud and Abuse Report finds that logins continue to be the biggest use case as digital-first customers constitute nearly three out of every four digital sessions. The report also shows that one in ten login requests are account takeover attempts.
Data harvested from breaches are fueling account takeover attempts. Further, fraudsters are graduating from (although they have not completely given up) credit card fraud to account takeover. Credit cards get hot-listed as soon as fraud is detected. But, account takeover remains undetected for a longer duration, allowing a larger time-frame to abuse the account. As a result, account takeover is on the rise.
ATO is Expensive
Once fraudsters break in to genuine customer accounts, they can cause serious financial losses to the account holders. They can siphon off the money, reward points, virtual game currency, and other assets in the accounts, access the saved payment details, launder money, and even abuse the compromised accounts as a front for other sinister crimes.
Digital businesses—especially finance, fintech, and gaming—are losing billions of dollars every year to account takeover. A recent Paypers post says account takeover cost businesses upward of $4 billion towards losses in 2018.
Apart from financial losses, businesses also lose customer trust. Their efforts to nurture customer relationships over a long time, come undone in a matter of few days! To add to the angst, customers can be unforgiving. They may not think twice when switching over to a competitor, should they lose trust in a business due to any such mischief with their accounts.
ATO is Difficult to Detect
Account takeover is particularly difficult to detect. Today, fraudsters are tech-savvy and have access to sophisticated tools and techniques. The anonymity of the internet makes it easier for fraudsters to mask their IP addresses and device details. They leverage technology to masquerade as genuine customers and use automated bots and human or ‘sweatshop’ driven attacks to attempt account takeover at scale. Using Single Request Attacks, they hide account takeover attempts and execute JavaScripts just like a human would do.
The Need for a Long-term Solution
Digital businesses cannot rely on point solutions for a guaranteed, 360-degree protection from account takeover fraud. Point solutions are neither scalable nor can adapt to the changing fraud techniques. Digital businesses, therefore, need a long-term approach to fight fraud—one that's rooted in preventing fraud and online abuse. An approach that makes an attack economically non-viable and quickly adapts to the evolving fraud landscape.
The Arkose Labs Advantage
At Arkose Labs, we partner with some of the leading global brands in their fight against fraud and safeguarding customer interests. We help our partners protect their customers from account takeover attempts without disrupting the online user experience. Using the Arkose Labs Fraud and Defense Platform, we understand the underlying intent of the users and stop fraud right at the entry gates.
Telemetry and Enforcement
Our Telemetry uses deep device forensics, location analysis, pattern correlation, and intelligent analytics to synthesize user data in real-time, which helps distinguish between genuine users and fraudsters. These insights are then used to present adaptive step-up Enforcement Challenges depending on the risk associated with a user profile.
Genuine users find it easy to clear these challenges. But, fraudsters must spend more time and extra resources to clear the challenges at scale. This targeted friction helps ensure automated tools and digital sweatshops are accurately detected. It also makes the attack more expensive for the fraudsters. Since the return on investment keeps diminishing, fraudsters abandon the attack.
To learn how Arkose Labs provides the definitive solution for long-term protection against account takeover attempts, read this solution brief.
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