How Developers Can Help Prevent ATO Fraud

As more businesses are going online and shifting their operations online, it requires customers to log in with their username, password, or other personal details to use a certain application. This has increased the account takeovers. Currently, this problem is troubling the payment industry frequently and looting users by invading their accounts using their details. This has become a common problem, as users use the same login id and password over different websites, which eases the process for hackers to break into their accounts and steal the user’s information.

What is ATO?

Account Takeover is when someone else logins to an account that is not theirs. It is also called account hacking. Big business tycoons and tech fathers like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Kayne West, etc. have been the victim of ATO attacks.

Statistics of ATO

Security.org suggests that 22% of U.S adults have been victims of ATO which costs around 24 million households. Even research claims that 60% of users have used the same password for multiple accounts. Besides this almost 33% of financial services and technology companies have been through the account takeover activity.

With the pandemic breakout, online shopping has increased which also increased the fraudulent logins by 282%. ATO fraud also affects the credibility of e-commerce sites and 28% of users proceed to close their account after facing such activities.

Cases of Account Takeover Scums

Well, as there are no limitations, criminals can easily acquire user accounts. Here are the few methods, that they use:

• Credential stuffing attack - Under this, the criminal tries all the possible combinations of email and password that they found in a large data dump.
• Phishing - Sends SMS or email to ask users to login into the clone website and from there redirect you to a page where the keylogger saves your password and other details.
• Social Engineering attacks - Contact the users directly and try to extract the exact information. This method is usually used on end-users and business executives.
• Man in the Middle attack - The fraudsters try to extract the data between end-users and sites. It uses techniques like SSL stripping or Evil Twin attacks.

Detect and Prevent the ATO Fraud

To prevent the ATO, detect the fraud first. Follow, the below procedure:

Detect ATO Fraud

It's quite difficult to detect fraud on e-commerce or merchant sites. Such cases happen user by user, which means you have to actively go monitor the account of each user.

Criminals even use a broad range of tactics to break through the usernames and passwords.

There are a few proven tactics that can be used to catch the abuse before it negatively affects your business. For instance, online criminals use fake emails to redirect customers to dummy sites that look branded but are not.

• To monitor your online presence use Google Alerts as you will receive an automatic notification when Google witnesses your company name sites (including dummy sites).
• Also adding your email address to the company’s newsletter will be great. If some fraudster will try to send a fake email blast, you will also receive the message and handle it accordingly.

Fraud Management Filter to secure E-commerce website:

• For example, using velocity filters, you can decline the usage of your user’s card numbers by considering the several factors that make it suspicious.
• Using threshold filters, set both a minimum and maximum limit of purchases. If the products you are selling cost around $10, then this filter will automatically figure out the flag purchase made of $0.50.

Prevention is always better than cure.

1. Prevention of ATO fraud

As a business, it's your responsibility to the data protection services.

• Use SSL on the pages that have sensitive data with personal user information like credit cards, addresses, numbers, etc. Use of encryption for logins and communication.
• Secure devices using the antivirus and mobile device protection
• As the developers hire white hat hackers to remove all the bugs from the developed solution and websites.

2. User Friction

Setting friction during login or signup might become an obstacle for the users but it is quite important. Balance it by deploying invisible authentication tools.

3. Fraud Detection Software

Detecting the suspicion is quite challenging due to the limited data availability. The more data you have, the easier it will be for you to detect the risk.

Using the following software, single data information will make it easier to detect fraud.

• Device Fingerprint - An id can be created by using the data available on the browser, OS, device, and network to find the suspicious connection. It will help you to calculate and prevent the users from login into unknown devices or browsers. Besides this, it can detect the suspicion of virtual machines or emulators fraudsters doing multiple requests from the same system.
• IP Analysis - It can be used to reveal VPN proxies or TOR usage.

Reasons for such Account Takeovers

• To collect data - Hackers might do it intentionally to extract information like numbers, and credit card information and sometimes it can be the Personal Identifying Information (PII) for other theft. These attacks often happen in healthcare, the public sector, and even in education institutions.
• Digital Currency Fraud - There are some virtual currencies like in games that can be resold to win real money.
• Promo Abuse - Some fraudsters target multiple accounting techniques to get many signs up or referral bonuses and this is usually targeted at legitimate accounts.
• Spam - By creating a real account using a tool to create a fake list of goods that don’t even exist and write reviews about them.
• Card Testing - Some accounts are made to do small purchases to test credit cards. This helps criminals to check the validity of stolen cards and use them to make purchases.

Conclusion

However, it's both users' and businesses' responsibility to prevent account takeovers. Businesses can seek help from developers like RGInfotech to build such a secure solution using encryption and different software to detect and prevent account takeover. Organizations should also inform their users about such frauds and how they can prevent themselves.