The attack vectors of online scams morph faster and faster, making it consistently more difficult for security professionals to develop effective preventative solutions. Merely keeping pace with fraudsters’ latest tricks is not enough to adequately protect a system or network. This is especially true for online retailers and other businesses that open their virtual doors to international business.

According to the article, “Credit card fraud is a cross-border crime,” statistics have shown in recent years that online fraud trends can differ dramatically between countries. For example, online payment fraud in the UK dropped 10% from 2009-2010, while the US experienced a 157% rise in attempted payment fraud during that same period. (more…)

In the movies, there’s Batman and Robin, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and most recently, the resurgence of the Green Hornet and Kato. These popular crime fighting duos combine their individual strengths to combat criminal forces that are out to steal or destroy innocent victims. Similarly, hackers are perpetrating criminal activity across the Internet to steal people’s identities and use that information against organizations to commit all types of identity fraud.

Many companies are working hard to deploy effective security tools to protect their own organizations’ IT environments as well as their valued customers from online threats. The goal is to find a balance and a cooperative strategy to implement anti-fraud protections and management techniques that work together, however in many cases these tools end up working independently of each other and are not as effective as solutions that work together by design.

Like any great crime fighting duo, iovation’s comprehensive ReputationManager 360 risk mitigation service combines real-time risk and device reputation — two complementary transaction risk analysis features by nature — to provide a stronger, more powerful defense against more sophisticated and evolving cyber crimes. (more…)

As the holiday shopping season officially kicks off this week, Webroot reports that 55% of all web users will shop online this Christmas. That’s a 38% jump from last year. While this is good news for online retailers, it’s also a time for merchants of all sizes to be on full alert as cyber criminals work around the clock during the holiday season.

According to the article, “Watch out for credit card hackers this Christmas,” Rob McAdam of Pure Hacking, an organization dedicated to helping businesses protect their information assets, said it’s just not large corporations that hackers are targeting during the holiday season, but mid-sized retailers are becoming more and more affected by security breaches involving credit cards.

“We are typically finding larger retailers that rely on reputable payment gateways and who have made data security a priority are no longer the main targets for fraud.”

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A pair of cyberfraud advisories were issued to warn businesses and consumers about corporate account takeover fraud.

According to Errol Weiss, who runs the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) corporate account takeover task force, the effort by his group and other federal law enforcement agencies is to make businesses and consumers more aware of this type of cybercrime and provide recommendations on how they can protect themselves against such attacks. (more…)

As we wrap up the third quarter of 2010, iovation continues to see significant growth in the total number of device reputation checks performed for online businesses, along with the number of unique devices managed in the Device Reputation Authority (DRA) database.

With only three months remaining, iovation has already increased the annual growth rate for processed transactions by 67% over 2009. With more than 3.9 billion cumulative device reputation checks processed for e-commerce, financial, travel, gaming and online communities today, we expect to break 4 billion early in Q4.

We’ve also increased the overall number of unique devices by 110% over last year. Starting in 2006 with 5 million devices in our system, we now manage more than 390 million unique devices (including PCs, Macs, iPads, iPhones, Blackberries, Android, etc.). Surpassing 400 million unique devices is just on the cusp.

With cybercrime fraud losses more than doubling in 2009, Internet-based businesses need security solutions that allow them to proactively identify and make educated decisions on all incoming transactions. Through fraud and abuse evidence submitted by our worldwide, cross-industry subscriber base, iovation ReputationManager 360 combines device and account profiles, analytics, custom reporting, real-time business rules, device anomalies, and the experience and expertise of over 2,000 fraud analysts to help customers make quick, confident decisions on every online transaction request.

While friendly fraud is nothing new, according to an industry study it remains a prevalent problem throughout the online retail community. In the article, “Merchants’ Battle Against Friendly Fraud Will Be A Protracted One — Across Two Fronts,” LexisNexis found that friendly fraud accounted for more than one-third of the total fraud losses for online-only merchants in 2009, costing them .4% of their total annual revenue. While that number dropped slightly for the largest e-commerce merchants to about 24% of their total fraud losses, it still represented a significant amount of lost revenue last year.

Definition of friendly fraud: Any transaction, contested by a customer, where the merchant suspects that the customer or a personal associate (child, spouse) legitimately authorized the transaction in question. (more…)