SEON exposes the cybercrime problem the UK is currently facing

Businesses have performed a mass migration to working online and this is directly responsible for the 50% spike in internet usage across Europe seen by Vodafone. Many working online are complacent or possibly even unaware of the increasing threat level posed by cybercriminals. In late 2018, research from Hiscox identified that an SME was successfully hacked every 19 seconds in the UK but SEON believes this has risen by at least 50% in the past three months according to trends seen on its own platform. 

Businesses should protect themselves from three cybercrimes on the rise in 2020: 

• Account takeover – while organisations spend millions on preventing chargebacks and transaction fraud, ATOs are not taken as seriously as they should be – both by merchants and fraud prevention teams.
• Phishing – is still the number one cause for data breaches. Bot attacks and DDoS attacks are sometimes responsible, but more than 35% of the major data breaches started with phishing techniques. 
• ID theft and synthetic ID fraud – are targeting new services in the UK and US. A good example is the new rules from the UK Gambling Commission, which forces users to provide ID scans upfront. The problem is that these measures, while born from good intentions, create a massive demand for stolen and synthetic IDs. 

There are two areas that businesses should be aware of:

• PSD2 and Open Banking will continue to transform the online landscape – Fintechs and established financial institutions were the first verticals to feel the changes brought on by the EU’s Second Payment Services Directive. 
• The Asia-Pacific region needs to curb fraudulent app installs – More than half of non-organic installs of finance apps were fraudulent in the Asia-Pacific region (APAC) in 2019.