Sharp rise in fraud attack levels on mobile transactions, report finds

The rise of mobile is the key change agent in digital commerce currently. According to ThreatMetrix data, in the last three years the proportion of mobile transactions versus desktop has almost tripled. Mobile transactions, which include account creations, logins and payments, reached 58% of all traffic by the middle of 2018.

Mobile fraud rates have tended to lag behind the channel’s overall growth, however in the first half of 2018 mobile attack rates rose 24%, when compared to the first half of 2017. In the US, mobile attack rates experienced a far higher growth rate of 44% for the same period.

Financial institutions were besieged with 81 million cybercrime attacks in the first half of 2018 on the ThreatMetrix global network. Of these, 27 million were targeting the mobile channel as fraudsters turn their attention to the success story that is mobile banking adoption.

Overall, the biggest threat in financial services comes from device spoofing, as fraudsters attempt to trick banks into thinking multiple fraudulent log in attempts are coming from new customer devices, perhaps by repeatedly wiping cookies or using virtual machines.

Throughout the first half of 2018 there was an unprecedented spike in the volume of bot attacks targeting digital transactions worldwide. The ThreatMetrix Digital Identity Network registered a 60% spike in bot attacks in the second quarter of the year, increasing from 1 billion bot attacks in Q1 to 1.6 billion in Q2.

Large retailers are the primary targets as fraudsters attempt to infiltrate good user accounts and access sensitive personal data and saved credit card information. A total of 170 million bot attacks came from mobile devices in 1H 2018.Identity spoofing is widespread, with the ThreatMetrix Q2 2018 Cybercrime Report revealing this as the top attack vector (13.3%) for this sector.

Other highlights from ThreatMetrix Q2 2018 Cybercrime Report include:

• 54% of all ecommerce transactions are now cross-border, which is much higher than other markets, and emphasizes the industry’s increasingly global footprint.

• cross border ecommerce transactions are 69% more likely to be rejected as fraudulent, however, demonstrating the challenge of accepting overseas commerce.

• 25% of new eCommerce account applications are fraudulent, a 130% increase compared to Q2 2017.

• Attacks on financial services’ mobile transactions increased 33% year-over-year.

• China appears on the top five cybercrime attackers list for the first time ever.

All these findings are based on the analysis of 17.6 billion digital transactions on the ThreatMetrix Digital Identity Network during the first half of 2018.