What You Should Do Right Now to Avoid Account Takeover Attacks
Account takeover (ATO) has long been defined as an attack in which cybercriminals use stolen passwords and usernames to take control of online accounts. Hackers frequently gather account credentials through social engineering, data breaches, and phishing attempts, which cybercriminals acquire from the dark web. They exploit these credentials to deploy bots that automatically access travel, retail, finance, eCommerce, and social media sites, attempting to log in and testing password and username combinations. Eventually, attackers obtain a list of validated credentials and earn from selling or misusing the account. Account takeover attacks almost always result in some form of identity theft.
ATO attacks are more sophisticated and widespread than ever before. Over the last few years, online fraud has evolved rapidly. The COVID pandemic has resulted in a flood of freshly digital corporate processes and online consumer services, creating ideal ground for an unprecedented number of criminal actors to profit from account takeovers. Businesses shifting workloads and key development processes to the cloud are increasingly targets of previously unseen forms of financial theft. These new processes are being used by online crooks. According to a recent study, the ratio of fraudulent login attempts to total user logins has increased by 282 percent year over year.
This new surge of phishing login attempts is especially concerning for eCommerce sites, which account for 61% of all ATO attacks. Worse, 28% of online customers would cease doing business with a company if their credentials were taken from the company’s website, resulting in a significant loss of revenue.
In the digital age, businesses must provide much more safety than just preventing credit card and bank account details from being stolen. Organizations today require a security strategy to ensure that their web applications are safe against automated account fraud.
The automatic and rising methods of internet fraud
Account takeover has become a commoditized enterprise in the cybercriminal ecosystem. To automate assaults, fraudsters may now buy credential dumps from breaches and rent low-cost bot infrastructure. Automated account theft requires less time and resources than it has in the past. This is made worse by the fact that, despite years of professional advice, most people reuse passwords across dozens of websites and neglect to change them when they are compromised. As I previously stated, consumers are moving more commercial activities online, which means there are simply more digital transactions to imitate, resulting in more accounts to steal and more methods to exploit them.
As a security professional, you must guarantee that your solution can prevent ATO attacks without causing legal transactions to be blocked or lost. Only a multi-layered, intent-based detection method that both detects malicious logins and creates extremely few false positives can do this. To aid in fraud resolution, your solution must allow you to extract context from the data. This requires having clear visibility into which sites and user accounts have been compromised, as well as the strategies employed and whether the credentials are publicly available. You must be able to deploy the solution to both apps and websites without affecting the end user’s experience, load speeds, or responsiveness in any manner. You may also utilize the security demonstration to notify clients when an attempted account takeover is identified and blocked, as well as to advise them on how to avoid the risk.