As in-person transactions give way to digital, consumers are increasingly leaving behind personally identifiable information online. Fraudsters harvest all of this information from disparate channels and can easily spy on individuals across touch-points throughout their online journeys.
A tool for every fraud need
Phishing; cracking a WiFi network; using reverse image search for cyber stalking; taking over databases-- for all of these, fraudsters have started using sophisticated tools that make it ridiculously easy to trace the digital footprints of consumers. The list of tools below is not comprehensive-- fraudsters use a vast number of tools and websites to gather information as well as plan and orchestrate attacks:
- ANDRAX: A powerful penetration testing platform especially for Android, which allows the use of over 900 tools for hacking, cracking, and penetration testing, making it really simple for fraudsters to break-in anywhere.
- EagleEye: A stalking tool that allows reverse image search and image recognition to find people on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
- Hacktronian: An all-in-one hacking tool for Android and Linux that fraudsters use for attacking passwords, hacking websites, wireless testing, sniffing and spoofing, and exploitation.
- Hijacker: Graphical user interface for penetration testing tools. Fraudsters use this tool to gather information, launch attacks like deauthenticating one or all clients from a network, denial of service, beacon flooding, and so forth.
- PhoneSploit: This tool lets fraudsters identify and exploit a nearby device.
- Shellphish: This is a tool that fraudsters use to phish user details from as many as 18 social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google.
- SocialBox: This is a brute force attack framework especially for Facebook, Gmail, Instagram, and Twitter.
- SQLMap: Fraudsters use this tool for automatic SQL injection and taking over databases. Fraudsters not only can detect and exploit SQL flaws but also search specific databases by names, date, specific labels (like password), and so on.
- Ultimate Facebook Scraper: Using this bot, fraudsters can scrape every single detail from a target Facebook account including all public posts, status updates, uploaded and tagged photos/videos, and friend list-- including their profile photos.
An era of data breaches
One of the most popular methods to steal verified consumer information is data breaches. The incidents of data breach have become mainstream and fraudsters have credible databases of PII with them. The year 2019 was, by far, the worst in terms of the number of data breach incidents, which provided fraudsters with rich personal information of the consumers.
Impersonation to fool fraud prevention teams
A combination of data harvested from data breaches and hacked using numerous tools, fraudsters can impersonate genuine consumers with finesse to fool the fraud prevention teams. Fraudsters can plan and execute sinister crimes over a period of time—including account takeover, fake new account registration, payment fraud, denial of service, single request attacks, brute forcing, scraping, and so forth—without raising suspicion. By using automation, they scale up the attacks and maximize the exploits. Businesses incur financial and reputational losses while dealing a financial and emotional toll to consumers.
A constant cat-and-mouse game
Technological advances make it easier for fraudsters to engage businesses in a constant cat-and-mouse game, leaving businesses to respond to overwhelming incidents of fraud and online abuse. A traditional approach to fight a tech-savvy opponent will leave businesses running around in circles. Digital businesses must rethink their fraud-prevention strategies and adopt a long-term approach that helps fortify defenses against evolving threats.
Fight fraud with Arkose Labs
Leading digital businesses across the globe trust Arkose Labs in their fight against fraud and online abuse. Arkose Labs uses targeted friction to make the attacks so expensive—in terms of both the time and resources required—that the returns diminish, forcing fraudsters to abandon the attack. To learn more about this long-term fraud prevention approach, please schedule a demo now.
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