The Best Methods to Detect Account Takeover Fraud

Account takeover fraud (ATO) causes significant damage to businesses – both financially and reputationally. Direct costs include incoming chargebacks and inventory loss, while the company’s reputation suffers from customers’ frustration and distrust at having their trust abused.

Fraudsters use best methods to detect account takeover fraud login credentials to access a victim’s account on a website or mobile app and then exploit it for several malicious activities, such as unauthorized transactions and purchases, fraudulent credit card usage, identity theft and more. Detecting ATO attacks quickly is a critical step for online businesses, as the consequences can be severe for both consumers and businesses.

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The best methods to detect ATO attacks rely on a combination of time-worn practices such as requiring strong passwords, implementing a robust authentication process and limiting login attempts, and security solutions that monitor the connections between users, devices, geographical locations and transactions. A promising technology, graph analytics, enables analysts to quickly spot suspicious behavior, speeding up ATO investigations.

Many of the indicators of ATO attack are customer-initiated, such as changing the email address, phone number or password. These changes are usually legitimate, but fraudsters often target multiple sites in an attempt to find a valid username-password combination and then scale up their attacks by trying the same password at other retail, travel, bank, e-commerce and social media accounts. Moreover, the fraudsters are not always looking for financial gain. They may simply want to clone the victim’s profile on a social media site to post offensive content or slander politicians.