A report on cybercrime for Q1 2018 found that although high use of mobile devices and evolving fraudster tactics in Europe may be behind a rise in cybercrime attacks, rates of prevention and detection have also increased 30 per cent. The report, by ThreatMetrix, looked at cybercrime attacks from January – March 2018 that were detected by the ThreatMetrix Digital Identity Network, a system that analysed 1.9 billion transactions in Europe in Q1 and provides real-time analysis on fraudulent online payments, logins and new account applications.

ThreatMetrix identified the following cybersecurity trends in Europe:

• The analysis included 1.9 billion transactions in Europe in Q1 2018, out of a total volume of 9.3 billion global transactions. However, 38 per cent of all attacks continue to originate from Europe and 80 million European attacks were detected and stopped in near real time. This is a 30 per cent increase in detection and prevention rates compared to the previous year.
• Europe continues to experience more cybercrime than North America, with 1.1 times the number of attacks originating in Europe compared to North America.
• Attack growth also outpaced transaction growth by 86 per cent in comparison to Q1 2016, indicating a heightened risk landscape as fraudsters evolve their tactics to incorporate mass scale identity testing bot attacks with ever more advanced social engineering and malware attacks.
• Europe, and particularly the UK, remains one of the most advanced regions in terms of online and mobile banking, with higher user penetration rates than North America. This contributes to the fact that Europe sees 58 per cent of all transactions coming from a mobile device, compared to 51 per cent globally. This is largely driven by high login volumes via mobile banking apps. However the counterpart to this trend is that Threatmetrix's report found that 61 per cent of all login attacks target financial institutions originating from Europe.
• Europe is also a significant originator of global bot attacks, contributing 210 million bot attacks this quarter out of a total 1 billion worldwide attacks; 13 per cent of these originated from mobile devices. These predominantly come from Russia and the Ukraine.

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CTMfile take: The threat of cybercrime is not letting up and corporate treasurers as well as consumers need to stay alert to phishing or social engineering attacks.