As many people and organisations are still adjusting to the new digital reality, consumers are unfamiliar with digital tools and remain vulnerable to social engineering attacks, while businesses do not have the resources to deal with the higher volume of activity. These trends have led to a dramatic increase in fraud rates during the pandemic. The US Federal Trade Commission has received 275,000 complaints since last January. These correspond to over USD 210 million in COVID-19 fraud losses.
As per Experian, synthetic identity fraud is the fastest growing form of fraud due to the ready availability of personal information that has been exposed in data breaches, and that is likely to remain true into 2021. The company draws attention to the threat of ‘Frankenstein faces’ that use AI to combine features from different people to create new faces that can be used to get past biometric facial recognition systems.
Fraudsters will also take advantage of the disruption caused by COVID-19, as they will use the promise of vaccines and test kits to launch phishing attacks. In addition, they will try to get their hands on stimulus and unemployment benefits should the government decide to distribute more relief.
Bad actors will use techniques like script creation and credential stuffing to automate their attacks and achieve account takeovers at scale. Businesses will be vulnerable to such methods as long as they rely on usernames and passwords for security.
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