A new report on internet fraud is out from NuData Security, and it’s a bit dire. The NuData Security Online Fraud Detection Threat Research report, released in anticipation of America’s biggest autumn holiday, Black Friday, indicates that online account takeover is now a “primary means of attack from fraudsters and attack origins occurring predominantly outside of the U.S.”
Among the disturbing findings in NuData’s report: There’s a 14 percent jump in fraudulent login attempts in the month leading up to America’s Thanksgiving, and over 90 percent of all such attempts are automated. There’s also a worrying trend of fraud attempts coming from outside of the US, with criminals in Russia, China, and other regions re-routing their web traffic to obscure their true locations.
As has been noted by other researchers, the rise in online and mobile commerce has seen an increased presence of fraud in the realm of digital commerce. That’s one of the primary reasons that companies like Apple have begun to include fingerprint scanning biometric technology on their mobile devices; in Apple’s case, it has helped to secure transactions placed over its Apple Pay mCommerce platform which also features new privacy-centric payment security measures like account number tokenization. But some researchers are worried that consumer attitudes towards such security measures are lagging behind the advancement of fraud.
On the plus side, if fraudsters are hacking your account to buy things on Black Friday, at least they’re getting you some deals.
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