Fraudsters Target Financial Services with Small Stealth Attacks

Fraud campaigns targeting online financial services tend to be smaller, and subtler than fraud campaigns conducted for other online platforms.

According to a report by DataVisor– a big data security analytics provider– fraudsters are most active on social media platforms (no surprise there), and have to launch thousands of attacks on the platform in order to make a fraud campaign, well, financially worth it.

When it comes to financial services, however, fraudsters abandon the brute force attack in favor of stealth campaigns; the average attack campaign on a social media platform contains about 160 fraudulent accounts, while the average attack on financial services contains about 9 fraudulent accounts. Most attacks on social platforms are automated, the report states, due to the sheer volume necessary for a payday, while attacks on financial services tend to be launched manually, thanks to their smaller size, and as an attempt to blend in with normal usership.

From the report:

The reason for smaller campaigns may be due to fraudsters obtaining a higher profit margin from attacks on financial services, compared to social platforms where a large army of fake accounts are required to achieve the same result.

The full report may be viewed here.