Should You Worry About Account Takeover Attempts?
Account takeover attempts can affect all types of businesses. Learn why you should be concerned about your customers’ data.
An average of 291 records are stolen every second through various types of cyberattacks. How many of them are from your company?
Fraudsters are getting more sophisticated when it comes to data theft, and we constantly hear about big-name companies that have been affected by massive data breaches. At the same time, they’re engaged in smaller attacks on individual accounts, often through the use of phishing emails with links that look like the official company web page.
No matter how big or small your company is, and how secure you think your systems are, protecting your company against takeover attempts should be at the top of your mind. Why should you care? There are plenty of reasons.
Sheer Volume of Attempts
Big data breaches make the news only a couple of times a year, and this can allow you to falsely assume that they’re not happening often. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
In fact, security company Segasec took it upon themselves to look into takeover attempts on three prominent digital banks. In only 19 days, Segasec found over 600 suspicious URLs, some of which were live attempts at gaining access to customer data.
Furthermore, research shows that these attempts at gaining access to customer account information are on the rise, despite company security and user knowledge of common types of scams.
Clearly, this is a huge problem that needs to be addressed.
User Errors Affect You
For companies, one of the most frustrating aspects of account takeover attempts is that some of the faults lie with your customers. A customer might fall for an email that asks them to log into your site and not realize that the site is fake. In this case, the customer willingly gives over their account information to the scammer.
To make matters worse, customers still reuse passwords to make them easier to remember. Once the scammer has access to one password, they can attempt to use that password in other accounts and have a fair chance of gaining entry.
Unfortunately, these customer errors can eventually affect your business, whether they’re gaining access to your accounts initially and stealing that data or using the password data they glean from attacking your business on other sites.
Lost Productivity Fixing Problems
Finally, what happens when these fraudsters get access to your customer data? Your workers have to spend time fixing the problem. In small cases, this might mean that a customer service representative has to spend extra time on the phone with a customer who’s had their data stolen. A widespread attack might mean that multiple people on multiple teams have to drop what they’re doing for damage control, including things like fixing computer security, contacting customers, and maintaining public relations. Okta reports that in 2017, there were 62.2 million hours in lost productivity due to account takeovers.
You want your team to be focused on building your brand and innovating new products and technology, not repairing damage from lax security.
You can’t leave your company’s network security to just anyone. You need a company that’s so good at what they do, they’re authorized to work with casinos. Call Network Security Associates today to see what we can do for you.