Patrick Domingues

Cybercriminals keep using account takeover to trick account holders into giving them access to their bank accounts. Bank account takeover is especially lucrative for hackers because of the potential to steal money from the accounts. As most researchers and financial executives can attest, cybercriminals have increasingly used account takeover, which is more popular than most types of fraud.

A recent study has found that account takeover is big business for cybercriminals. It is a growing problem that can be devastating to a bank and its customers. As per the study by Javelin Research, account takeover increased by 90% in the last year. The firm estimates that financial fraud will cost $11.4 billion in 2021, which is about one-quarter of all financial fraud losses in 2018.

Cyber thieves are betting on the fact that if they try to seize a large number of accounts, eventually they will get a payoff. They are trying to take advantage of the fact that banks rarely detect online fraud.

CyberEdge Group, a leading IT security company, released a report last week that was incredibly similar to the findings of Forrester. The CyberEdge Group found that account takeover is the second most pervasive and expanding threat. The survey of 1,200 IT security personnel worldwide found that account takeover is a problem for more than half of businesses.

A Simple Solution.

When cyber criminals take over customer accounts, they typically access the information by getting customers to tell them their passwords. It’s important to educate your employees and customers on account security and access.

How can financial firms protect customers using a modern technology? I recommend multi-factor authentication as an excellent solution. According to Microsoft, MFA is the most effective way to stop most account compromises. To use it, financial companies must combine two or more factors including passwords, tokens, biometrics, and more. MFA would prevent over 99% of account takeover attempts.

I hope this article was helpful, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. If you would like to be notified of when I create a new post, you can subscribe to my blog alert.

Patrick Domingues

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