Q1 2016 Cybercrime Report

The current threat and cybercrime environment is like a huge firestorm that keeps feeding itself.  Data breaches turn into more account breaches and it becomes a cycle.  At the same time, fraud attacks are evolving, and becoming more widespread. Breaches continue to hit the headlines, with the Mossack Fonseca leak of 11 million documents in Panama to the Bangladesh bank heist that saw around $100 million wiped from the country’s foreign currency reserves. Part of the fallout of such breaches has been the huge debate around data privacy, with companies taking polar opposite stances. Some companies are trying to wash their hands of customer security, while others are fighting tooth and nail to protect personal data, regardless of the wider social consequences. At the same time, fraudsters seem adept at convincing customers to part with sensitive personal credentials, with social engineering attacks becoming cleverer than ever before and focusing on bank employees as high value targets. At the other end of the attack spectrum are automated botnet attacks. Fraudsters are becoming would-be generals of their very own botnet army, controlling vast networks of bot computers, some of which belong to unsuspecting consumers. ThreatMetrix continues to provide effective mitigation by accurately distinguishing between legitimate customers and fraudsters, looking holistically at behavioral trends and threat intelligence as well as the nuts and bolts of device identification, locations and identity information. With the growth of digital transactions, many companies, particularly financial institutions, are investing in digital transformation to prioritize a single view of the customer across all channels and touch points. It is crucial that this approach extends to fraud and security solutions however, to ensure that businesses protect against the full spectrum of possible attacks. Many internal operations work in siloes and miss taking a holistic view of risk. As ThreatMetrix continues to authenticate returning customers for thousands of global companies, it is also relying more than ever on accurate global threat intelligence from the ThreatMetrix Digital Identity Network to detect the complex and evolving attack vectors employed by cybercriminals. Download this whitepaper to find out more.