Cyber Threats Go Up as Economies Move to Digital Platforms and Mobile Solutions

Friday, August 16th, 2019

Digital platforms and mobile devices are booming. You can gauge just how much based on a spotlight study on the live interactions investigating online buyer habits titled the ThreatMetrix EMEA Cybercrime Report: Q1 2019.

Mobile devices initiated an entire 71% percent of all transactions made in 2019’s Quarter-one (a total of 3.1 billion).

The research, which sought to understand the customer habits all over Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, hence the initials EMEA, also focused on the cyber-attacks suffered in 2019’s first quarter (Jan-Mar).

Attacks were monitored across the customer’s journey from account creation to login stages and down to the payment process.
Here is what the report found;

“With the continuing expansion of the ecommerce digital economy to take over from traditional in-store methods of doing business, firms must lay more emphasis on customer data security, sophisticated digital ID verification, frictionless authentication, and staunch fraud prevention.”

“Meanwhile, the need for more scrutiny of personal shopper data continues to shake the balance between security and the friction-free purchase experience online retailers want to give their consumers.”

But as ecommerce companies work to strike a balance between friction-free verification and unswerving fraud detection, “shoppers don’t expect stringent verification techniques to or their personal data protection guarantee, to come at the cost of backbreaking identity authentication procedures or needless steps.”

As merchants struggle to do their math right, cybercriminals who’ve studied the customer journey and spotted loopholes come in to exploit retailers. So the going is never easy for the online retailer, they have to distinguish between real and real-looking customers and still be weary
of outright cyber thieves.

Stephen Topliss, VP of Fraud at LexisNexis Risk Solutions warned retailers.

“With the transformation toward mobile transactions, more so in the regions studied, merchants must watch out for cybercriminals who are out to take advantage of new loopholes and business must share tips and ideas in combating cybercrime.

Final Thoughts

Judging from previous cybercrime trends, this report should come as a shock to merchants. Fraudsters are quick to shift to the most lucrative platforms, and mobile was their next obvious landing spot.

Small, Medium and Large businesses must now understand that security is a priority, much like every other thing they do to keep their firms in operation.