New cyberfraud and general fraud studies show how to protect your company.

Verizon 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report

Card payments: new Verizon 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report study shows that almost half of companies fail to secure their payment systems from hackers. Cybercrime is rampant, as this infographic from the study shows:

Source & Copyright©2017 - Verizon

Verizon found that “While attackers are using new tactics and tricks, their overall strategies remain relatively unchanged. Understanding them is critical to knowing how to defend your organization from cyberattacks.” Overall they recommend that companies should:

• Be vigilant: Log files and change management systems can give you early warning of a breach.
• Make people your first line of defense: Train staff to spot the warning signs.
• Only keep data on a “need to know” basis: Only staff that need access to systems to do their jobs should have it.
• Patch promptly: This could guard against many attacks.
• Encrypt sensitive data: Make your data next to useless if it is stolen.
• Use two-factor authentication: This can limit the damage that can be done with lost or stolen credentials.
• Don’t forget physical security: Not all data theft happens online.

Feedzai: AI and machine learning in detecting and minimising fraud

The esoteric report from Feedzai, who provide a Machine Learning Platform for Fraud and Risk control, reports that the data breech is now endemic, and that companies need to build their defenses based on machine learning and artificial understanding. The report lists five reasons why machine learning is key for fraud detection because it:

1. enables Pattern Detection
2. Handles omnichannel and omnidata ingestion
3. Provides long-tail navigation
4. Is fast
5. Has built in self improvement

And this combined with artificial intelligence convergence is now delivering important improvements in fraud control, see their booklet on The Dawn of Machine Learning for Banking and Payments.

Behavioral Analytics about to break through

NICE Actimize - who provide a range of financial crime prevention, compliance and risk management products and services to the financial sector - has released the findings of a new survey focused on behavioural analytics technology (“the measurement of anomalies from an individual's "'normal'" behavior or their peer group across multiple risk factors”) which shows that the adoption of behavioral analytics among financial services firms is about to take off. (See CTMfile post on biometrics, here.)