Researchers had recently published a study that estimated more than $343 billion to be lost worldwide in the next five years due to cybercriminal groups innovating their extortion, account takeover, hacking, and identity fraud tactics. The study highlighted that this estimate is possible despite organisations’ widespread use of cybersecurity and identity verification measures.
Since people worldwide mostly rely on online payments for their transactions, such as the sale of goods and banking transfers, fraudsters could leverage all these modes to conduct their malicious objectives. Several attack tactics, such as phishing, BEC (Business Email Compromise), and social engineering, are a few methods fraudsters could use to steal money from people.
Cybersecurity teams must create stronger anti-fraud and identity verification procedures to prevent the upsurge of online payment fraud globally.
The right combination of identity verification measures, alongside other anti-fraud tools, could help protect people from prevalent fraud threats worldwide. However, the experts said cybersecurity teams must be prepared with significant capabilities to achieve this objective.
As explained by researchers, there are no two online payment transactions that are the same. Hence, the security of these individual online transactions cannot follow a single solution that could be effective for every transaction. The researchers suggest that anti-fraud teams build a collection of verification procedures that are engineered seamlessly to be effective against cyberattacks and also design different solutions for all possible circumstances.
These recommendations aim to protect both vendors and users online and minimise the chance of reaching the estimated monetary losses worldwide in the coming years because of fraud.
Based on the research, physical goods purchases account for the largest source of loss for fraudulent attacks, with about 49% of the total online payment fraud losses worldwide for the next years. According to the researchers, the threat actors specifically target this segment because of the physical goods’ resale potential.
The researchers recommend online merchants implement strong measures against the risks of fraud. On the other hand, security vendors must address these issues and consider upgrading their capabilities to protect consumers and vendors from being victimised.
