210 Million Global Fraud Attacks Detected During 2018’s First Quarter

San Jose, Calif-based ThreatMetrix analyzed the global and regional evolution of cybercrime across over some nine billion first quarter 2018 transactions, 210 million attacks and a billion bot attacks.

ThreatMetrix transactions span e-commerce, financial services, media, gaming and gambling and insurance sectors and cover the authentication, payments and account originations use cases. Logins and payments continue to be the biggest use cases as their customers deploy ThreatMetrix to authenticate user identities without affecting the consumer experience.

“Cybercrime will continue to evolve as fraudsters try to beat the system: new advanced bots, new types of malware, enhanced remote access software for social engineering scams,” the report said. “Cybercriminals have always been master opportunists, but lone wolves have evolved into highly organized enterprise outfits looking to disrupt on an unprecedented scale. Look at the billions lost to ransomware in 2017, as well as the scams.”

ThreatMetrix analyzed transactions from top organizations across industries. Trends observed represented key market trends:

• The detection and prevention of 210 million attacks in real time; a 62% increase over the previous year. In addition, the risk landscape has heightened: attack growth outpaced transaction growth by 83% in comparison to the first quarter in 2016.
• This quarter has seen a proliferation of attacks on the e-commerce industry, with transactions in that sector 10 times riskier than those in financial services. “Cybercriminals see eCommerce as a growing target,” said the study.
• Organized bot attacks continue to proliferate, with a record 1 billion bot attacks, predominantly targeting e-commerce merchants seen in the first quarter, 100 million of which were from mobile devices.
• Just over half of transactions in the ThreatMetrix network come from mobile devices (55% for financial institutions), a 170% increase compared to the first quarter of 2015.
• Sixty percent of all account creations originate from a mobile device, indicating its increased role as the key enabler across the entire customer journey.
• Many consumers still perform large, complicated actions across a range of devices, indicating the need for businesses to look beyond device intelligence to verify identity and authenticate transactions.
• The anatomy of bot attacks continues to shift and morph; transactions from several new and emerging economies such as Vietnam, Egypt, South Korea, Ecuador and Ukraine are very likely to be bots, and contribute significantly to the overall bot volumes seen globally.

The report acknowledged, “Cybercrime is now an industry unto itself; and its lifeblood is data. Data is, unfortunately, becoming easier to steal and monetize for cybercriminals. Billions of online users are generating huge swathes of data and, as we have seen recently.” The study added in many cases users relinquish data oblivious to who sees it and how entities use it. “Stolen data gives the faceless cybercriminal a fraudulent mask, an identity, which can be used to open or takeover user accounts or make bad payments with stolen credit card data. This is making it increasingly difficult for organizations to separate the good from the bad.”

What may be surprising to some, the UK and U.S. remain the largest attack originators of all global cybercrime while other nations emerge as originators of these threats. These include Vietnam, Brazil and Russia, which appeared on the top five attacker list for the first time mainly due to large scale bot attacks, as stolen identity data continues to permeate an ever wider global geography. In addition, regional trends in cybercrime, such as the propensity towards new account origination fraud in South America, have a a strong effect on attack volume.

“There are also several countries – China and India for example – that are consistently within the top 10 largest attack originators, further mirroring this trend towards greater global diversity of attacks,” the report suggested. In addition, a few emerging economies also perpetrated a higher volume of attacks in comparison to 2017’s last quarter, including Singapore, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Zambia.

While the largest attackers tend to launch local attacks within their own country, and other similar global economies, they are also attacking countries within their region. For example, Vietnam targets Japan, Singapore and Australia; while Brazil targets Argentina and Colombia.