A study has shown that the most noticeable growth in mobile attacks by fraudsters attempting to infiltrate user accounts by brute force (using mobile bots) or stealth (using mobile remote access attacks) is on account logins. This report is based on 17 billion digital transactions on the ThreatMetrix Digital Identity Network findings during the second half of 2018, with 61 percent of digital transactions originating from a mobile device thereby revealing a change in fraudsters’ tactics particularly on financial services.

A bot attack is a type of malicious attack that utilises a series of connected computers to attack or take down a network, network device or website. This development contributes to the 107per cent growth in mobile account takeovers in comparison to H1 2018, despite the fact that overall attack rates are low.

It further stated that in some parts of the world like North America and Asia, fraudsters are shifting focus from desktop to mobile attacks. In these areas, financial services companies saw a 48 per cent year-over-year growth in attack rates and a 116per cent increase in mobile transactions, with a 35 per cent increase in mobile attacks.

The network also detected and stopped 2.1 billion bot attacks on e-commerce merchants, a 142 per cent growth compared to the same period last year. Account logins in e-commerce are much more desktop based, with 69 per cent of logins via desktop.

In the ecommerce sector, although sophisticated attacks have actually dropped during H2 2018, the impact of high-volume automated bot traffic continues to disrupt the industry. Identity-testing bot attacks often make up considerably more of an ecommerce merchant’s daily transaction volume than good traffic, making a low-friction online experience for trusted customers all the more challenging for merchants to provide.

The report also noted that key to the challenges for ecommerce merchants, particularly during festive and frenzy business periods is balancing optimised customer experience and low-friction authentication, while also maintaining effective fraud control. This might at some point mean accepting a higher percentage of fraud to accept more genuine orders from good customers.

The challenge on growing economies as with Nigeria and other African and Asian countries is better education on these growing menace in the technology based financial services sector, the report concludes.

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