More businesses operating in the modern business landscape are becoming more reliant on digital technology and platforms as they try to keep pace with the continual shifting of trends and practices. These enterprises leverage technological innovation to streamline their business operations, improve workforce productivity, boost their market position, and improve customer experience.
However, the same digital tools are being used by fraudulent individuals. They use these modern innovations and their sophisticated tacticsto circumvent fraud prevention measures of multifactor authentication (MFA).
The most common ways fraudsters bypass MFA’s strong customer authentication are through social engineering, SIM swapping, and malicious accessibility.
In social engineering attacks, cybercriminals utilize phishing or man in the middle (MITM) attacks to trick customers into providing information like their username and password they use on a specific platform. Meanwhile, in SIM swapping, fraudsters pretend to be the mobile phone owner when contacting the phone company to request a new SIM card, which they will use intercept one-time passwords (OTP) sent via SMS.
With malicious accessibility, hackers exploit a known software or firmware vulnerability or an unknown vulnerability (or a zero-day exploit). The unknown vulnerability exploit essentially means the fraudsters discover a vulnerability in the software before any fraud prevention measures can be taken. They then engineer some type of malware and make an attack. Since the online platform is unaware of this vulnerability, they have no fraud prevention protocols in place, making the attack highly likely to succeed.
Once malicious actors are in the system, they take advantage of their access to conduct their illegal activities, which can greatly impact enterprises. Compromised businesses could lose a significant amount of their income, have their reputation damaged, and lose their customers’ trust. Therefore, business entities must implement more robustsecurity protocols to boost fraud prevention in their systems.
Generally, the primary target factor of social engineering and SIM swap attacks is knowledge-based authentication credentials such as passwords or PINs. Thus, enterprises must utilize stronger authentication factors like device-based and biometric authentication factors.
Many identity solutions companies, such as LoginID, offer stronger customer authentication methods like digital signature authenticationthat can be integrated into websites or apps. With a digital signature, people can securely and conveniently authorize sensitive transactions.
Here is an infographic from LoginIDthat details how modern authentication methods provide secure, private authentication for the future.
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