Account takeover (ATO) has historically been defined as an attack in which cybercriminals take control of online accounts by using stolen passwords and credentials. Cybercriminals buy a list of account credentials from the dark web, which hackers normally gather through social engineering, data breaches, and phishing attempts.
They use these credentials to create bots that automatically access travel, retail, finance, eCommerce, and social media sites in order to test password and username combinations and login. Attackers eventually obtain a list of validated credentials and earn by selling these credentials to others or abusing the account. Account takeover attacks almost always result in some form of identity theft.
ATO attacks are more sophisticated and widespread than ever before. Online fraud has evolved tremendously in recent years. The COVID pandemic has resulted in a flood of freshly digital company processes and online consumer offers, providing fertile ground for an unprecedented number of bad actors to profit from account takeovers. Businesses shifting workloads and key development processes to the cloud are increasingly targets of previously unseen techniques to financial fraud. These new processes are being used by online crooks. According to recent study, the ratio of fraudulent login attempts to total user logins has increased by 282 percent year over year.
Organizations in the digital age must go beyond simply preventing credit card and bank account details from being stolen. Organizations today require a security plan that protects their web applications from automated account fraud.
How internet fraud strategies are becoming more automated and widespread
Account takeover has become a commodity in the cybercriminal ecosystem. To automate assaults, fraudsters may now buy credential dumps from breaches and rent low-cost bot infrastructure. The time and resources necessary for automated account theft have never been lower. This is made worse by the fact that, despite years of professional guidance, most customers repeat passwords across dozens of sites and neglect to change them when breaches occur.
Your ATO prevention solution must not interfere with site performance
As a security professional, you must guarantee that your solution can prevent ATO attacks without disrupting or losing legal transactions. This is only possible with a multi-layered, intent-based detection method that detects malicious logins while producing extremely few false positives. To aid in fraud resolution, your solution must allow you to extract context from data.
This includes acquiring visibility into which sites and user accounts are being attacked, what strategies were utilized, and whether the credentials are publicly available. You must be able to deploy the solution to both applications and websites without affecting end user experience, load times, or responsiveness. 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.