Account takeover is a situation where someone logs into another person’s account. In other words, it is the process of account hacking. During account takeover, the fraudster does one or all the following:
1. Transfer the account login into another person to gain monetary benefits
2. Use your account to scam others
3. Uses the account to buy goods and services
4. Mine the account for personal data
It is essential to know that accounts take attempts to happen at all times regardless of the size of your business. As long as you have employee accounts in your business, be sure someone will attempt to steal them. At the same time, it is essential to know that such attempts may ruin your business.
Even the biggest tech companies in the world have experienced account takeover attacks. Thus it is essential to take precautions before it happens to your company. If giants can experience account takeover, what about your small business? Understanding how it happens and preventing it from happening is a big security step in your business. Even though taking over fraud prevention may seem like a daunting process, it pays in the long run. Here are some essential tips to guide in deploying the best anti-fraud tools for login monitoring. Also, it is essential to learn how to prevent and detect credential stuffing attacks.
Secure Your Services
The best way to prevent account takeover fraud is by combining the powerful anti-fraud tools and educating your employees. To attain good online hygiene to ensure your site’s total protection, make sure you employ the best data protection services. Protect all the data you collect, transfer, process, and access from your site. Your data usage should be under stringent protection procedures.
Protect any page that collects sensitive data like using credit cards, social security numbers, or addresses. It is advisable also, to use SSL on such a page to ensure total security. When you have to send important customer information across the company to other employees, make sure you encrypt it if possible.
Also, it will help you if you grip employee permission to restrict what employees can do on your company data. Restricting permissions will mean fewer employees have access to sensitive data. The few who have access also know that they are responsible for what happens to the data. Also, protect anything that may contain sensitive information like phones, laptops, and desktops. Mismanaging these devices may give access to sensitive information to the fraudsters. Depending on your company’s capability and size, you can also engage researchers to help you identify any vulnerability. They can help you identify what may lead to a possible account takeover.
Secure Your Login
One of the most effective protection of your account is to deploy proper login monitoring tools. You can keep a significant percentage of fraudsters away from account takeover by using the right login tracking tools. It is essential to collect login data whenever there is a login attempt, both the successful and the denied access information.
The data will let you know the IP address, device information, and also basic behavior. You can get such information through device fingerprints. The use of device fingerprints to create hash/ID using the browsing data can be very effective. It also does not require any technical calculations. It prevents the user from logging in using unknown devices or browsers. Also, fraudsters use virtual machines, which you can easily detect when you deploy the use of device fingerprinting.
Another standard fraud prevention method is by using IP analysis. It will reveal the location and suspicious proxies, blacklisted servers, PVN, and also TOR usage. By looking at how many times there was attempted login and the IP, you can identify a possible account takeover.
Educate Users about the Risks
Training your employees about the possible account takeover avenues is one of the best ways to prevent it. Your employees should be aware of all the potential cybersecurity threats and the best way to prevent them. You can attain that by sending regular security notifications and making sure they understand their account’s value. Detecting a possible account takeover before it happens helps isolate the fraudster they cause damage to your company.
Secure Your Account When Buying Goods and Services
Operating a digital wallet is one of the most vulnerable uses of an account. Fraudsters will always be targeting your account, and you also have more to lose. You can lose your business through this kind of fraud, which is why it is essential to be vigilant. If you notice any suspicious shipping address or a change in IP, you should be very careful and, if possible, stop the transaction first. Preventing account takeover will save you your account and your business.
When selling goods and services, it is vital to make sure that the customer matches the credit card’s location and the payment method. Also, you should be able to compare the customer’s fingerprints with that of the cardholder.
Watch Out for Account Mining for Personal Data
Sophisticated fraudsters extract more value from an account by mining it for personal data. The hackers can download previously submitted KYC documents or how to reset 2FA security for other accounts. You can tell when that happens when you note mass password reset requests or multiple changes to one account in a single session.
Keeping tabs on high-risk logins is a great way to detect account takeover attempts before something terrible happens. It is essential to send the user a quick notification about the suspicious login and lock in the account until the user confirms identity. That is one of the most effective ways of stopping account takeover fraud.
Watch Out For Scams
From the communication going on in your account, you should note any scam and prevent it immediately. Scams from account takeover are easy to manage, but you must act fast to avoid losing your business reputation.
You should also be able to protect against account takeover by safeguarding your login details. That is by not using an easy-to-guess password or protecting your devices against malware. You can as well prevent it by avoiding bought credentials that are sold cheaply in bulk. It is critical to protect and keep all valuable accounts safe because they are the most targeted by fraudsters.