Soon after information became available online, criminals found ways to manipulate it for financial gain. As businesses moved toward the online world to promote their services and market their brand, criminals obtained new methods of conducting cyber fraud.
Yes, we’ve created a great number of cybersecurity options such as firewalls, antiviruses, and learned a lot about intrusion detection over time. However, just as experts are finding new cybersecurity methods, criminals are becoming more creative with their cyber-fraud ideas. In 2021, these attacks resulted in $6 trillion in annual loss, a doubled number since 2015.
Cyber fraud is present all over the internet. Every day, 3.4 billion phishing emails are being sent. This is even more prominent in the SaaS cloud world with account takeovers, coupon abuses, and ‘buy online pick-up in store’ attacks being carried out every day.
Attacks and fraudulent activities are now designed to bypass the security layers that worked in the past. Just imagine – we have so many tools and knowledge at our disposal, and cyber attacks are still more numerous and successful than ever. This means that we need to adjust our strategies to the changing trends in the cybercrime world and find new effective ways to protect ourselves.
That’s precisely what you’ll read about in this article – the most useful methods for detecting and preventing cyber fraud of today.
Why is it important to detect cyber fraud?
If you fall victim to cyber fraud, you could lose millions. But, it is not only you that will suffer losses.
According to an FTC (Federal Trade Commission) report, there’s been a 70% increase in customer fraud reports in 2021 compared to 2020, resulting in a total of $5.8 billion in consumer losses.
Protecting your business from fraudsters won’t just save you a lot of money. It could potentially help your business survive, as well as keep it compliant with regulations and laws. Most importantly, this will increase customer loyalty since your audience will feel safer buying from your brand.
Top methods for detecting and mitigating fraud risks
No one thinks that they’ll be victims of cyber fraud until they actually become it. They think: ‘my business is too small, criminals won’t be interested’. Or, ‘I have antiviruses in place, there’s no way they’ll breach my company’.
Truth is, cyber crime can come in many ways. An employee might open a ransomware email. You might be tricked by a person working at your company. They might use your online store to scam your customers and steal their money.
This means that no one is untouchable online, regardless of what they’re selling or how big their business is. It also means that it is time for you to take matters into your own hands to prevent this from happening to you.
Here is how you can do it.
#1. Use fraud detection software to mitigate fraud risk
Cyber attacks can often be prevented. Sometimes, the only thing you can do is mitigate the risks and minimize the damage they do to your business. Seeing how severe the consequences of such attacks can be, you need the best tool in your arsenal to detect and mitigate fraud risk today.
That tool is DataDome, a bot detection software that offers protection of the most complex architecture. The tool runs in any cloud and will protect your website, apps, and APIs from bot and fraud attacks.
With this level of cybercrime in the world today, you cannot possibly prevent all attacks on your own. DataDome handles a huge amount of data in a short time thanks to automation, something that a big team of employees won’t be able to do manually even if you give them months.
If you want to prevent cyber attacks that will cost you money and your reputation, this is the smartest method to use. DataDome protects from online fraud including scalping, scraping, account takeover, credential stuffing, DDoS attacks, and even carding fraud. Processing a trillion pieces of data daily, this tool protects the largest e-commerce enterprises globally.
#2. Monitor user behavior and analyze it
Traditional methods like strong passwords or antiviruses will provide you with some protection, but they won’t tell you anything about the people accessing your system. Most businesses these days have no idea what their users’ behaviors look like. This makes it harder to detect fraudulent attempts since, after all, how will you detect anomalies when you don’t know what is normal?
The more you know about your user and their behavior, the better you can detect potential threats. Not to mention, tracking the behaviors will create scary accurate buyer personas, which is the best marketing tool in your arsenal.
If you keep track of what your users search, how they buy, how they communicate with you, and other things that define their behaviors, you can analyze this data and use it to detect cyber fraud. It will be much easier to customize your security software and notice discrepancies to detect fraud before it harms you.
#3. Address insider threats
When we think of cyber attacks, we imagine a person in a hoodie in a dark place, surrounded by screens, trying to steal people’s data and money. No one wants to think that cyber-attacks are a result of an inside mistake, so we often forget to tackle our network.
Did you know that 19% of security incidents and data breaches result from insider misuse? To make it worse, 27% result from miscellaneous errors inside the companies.
This makes for a big percentage of cyber fraud. Whether your employee does it intentionally or unintentionally, it will still harm your business. It is your job to look not only outside, but also inside to detect threats, educate your employees, and find the anomalies within behavior patterns that seem regular.
#4. Educate people on updated security measures
Not even the best software or endless scanning will save your business if your employees and vendors allow the cyber attacks to happen. This brings up the question: are the people in your company aware of the security measures and the risks? According to a PwC survey, only 51% of companies have a good employee training program when it comes to security.
Just imagine this. It takes a single employee that opens a malware attachment, and your entire network gets compromised. Chances are, this employee will have no idea what happened or even that they were the cause of the problem.
If you want to detect and prevent cyber fraud in your organization, you need to make sure that everyone in it knows the security measures and the risks.
#5. Keep everything up to date
Every application, tool, and system you use will have some updates at some point. Don’t avoid these – they are aimed to make it more secure for you. Keep all your applications and systems updated at all times, and apply security patches wherever possible.
The providers of those tools constantly work on improving the security, as well as the quality of their products. Their updates are a way to keep malicious cybercriminals from gaining access and making you a victim of their attacks.
#6. Use strong passwords to protect your accounts
All those requirements when you create new accounts such as long passwords with capital letters, symbols, and numbers are made for a reason. Strong passwords keep accounts safe and are very hard to crack.
Create strong passwords for your accounts, but don’t stop there. Make these unique to accounts – don’t use the same password everywhere. Most importantly, change the passwords often.
#7. Limit the access within your company
If you limit your employees’ access to data, applications, and other things that your company uses, this can create more work for you. You’d have to approve their access, change it regularly, and keep track of this.
It sounds like a lot of work, so many companies avoid this. They simply give everyone access to everything and do not keep track of how they use it.
This is a big mistake and it is one that will possibly result in cyber fraud. If you want to protect your business, you need to provide selected users with privileged access, and access to the most sensitive information of your business.
Not every user in your company should have the option to execute applications as they want or install things in your network. While this will require a vigilant management approach, as well as require more effort on your behalf, it is one of the best ways to keep your company safe.
Quality employee onboarding software should make this very easy for you.
Wrapping up
Cyber threats are becoming harder to detect every day. The cost of cyber fraud is getting bigger with every passing year, too. Instead of relying on traditional, outdated tools that criminals are very good at surpassing, you need to take matters into your own hands and protect your data.
Hopefully, this article will help you do exactly that – add a fierce line of defense and detect cyber fraud before it harms you.
