Thought it was time to get back in touch now that the summer seems to be over. Kids, or in my case grand kids, are off to school, iPhones have been issued to track every movement, and life returns to what we call normality.
But this business doesn't give you a break. It’s becoming impossible to keep up with security breaches. In fact it’s no longer news, unless of course you happen to be an Ashley Madison customer, in which case it’s a nightmare and you're probably busy trying to remove your details from the leaked data!
Some Interesting News Over The Summer
Stolen PII - Using stolen personally identifiable information (PII) to create new accounts is becoming the latest craze with fraudsters. According to a report from NuData Security, creating new accounts the consumer doesn't know about, has doubled in the past 6 months to the point that between May and July, 57% of created accounts were flagged as either high-risk or outright fraudulent compared to 28% in the three months before that.
Customer Experience it seems comes at a price. According to Experian, the rapid rise in demand for online banking and e-commerce services is leaving many people exposed due to the lack of security on devices. Apparently global losses resulting from fraud are in the region of $4.5 trillion – not even sure I know how many zeroes that is. In any case it seems that many organizations are willing to risk a lot to insure we all have a pleasant experience
E-Commerce fraud is growing according to ThreatMetrix. During the last quarter, they report that fraud attacks increased by 20% compared to the previous quarter. To put this in perspective, we're talking about 36 Million attacks, of which 80% were account logins, 19% and 1% were account creations.
And What About BehavioSec?
Well apparently 3.3 million Norwegians are having their behaviour monitored using BehavioSec technology when doing online banking. And it seems that we've a detection rate of above 99% in being able to identify if you are who you claim to be. This is according to http://www.dn.no/nyheter/politikkSamfunn/2015/08/21/2142/IT/overvker-deg-nr-du-taster. Since my Norwegian is not at its best these days I have to take the word of our marketing people.
Also during the summer there was an interesting discussion going on in the public domain about whether behavioural biometrics actually worked http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/03/typing_based_biometrics_analysis/. The researchers has used the BehavioSec demo site to test their theory, since it seems it was one of the few, if not the only one that allows people to test online http://www.behaviosec.com/technology/demos/, and claimed to have beaten the system. In fact what they had proved was that they could hide their behaviour, and as a result could not get access to the application – which is actually the point of the demo! Turned out to be a storm in a teacup.