Allure Security surveyed IT and security personnel to understand how companies are addressing digital impersonation and account takeover threats. The survey finds that companies are being impersonated and customers are being compromised.
Allure Survey finds 75% of respondents have noticed an increase in ATO attempts in the last year
As we enter the Post-Covid era, does that mean we are all going to stop our reliance on digital shopping, banking, remote work and digital lifestyle?
One thing is clear, malicious activity cases have skyrocketed comparatively to what they were before the pandemic, and it is getting worse. Our survey asked respondents to rate security related topics such as the worst results of account takeover and the average costs for damage control, as well as more open ended questions like their methods for learning of compromised accounts.
Account takeover is when criminals steal credentials and impersonate a genuine customer to log in to their accounts – banking, telecommunications, e-commerce accounts, the list goes on. These types of attacks not only affect individuals who are compromised but the brands of the companies being impersonated, the methods through which they gain access to your accounts are numerous. Possible attack vectors include authentic-looking fake websites designed to log your keystrokes when you try to log in, phone calls and text messages containing malicious links, and bots attempting to use brute force to crack passwords, to name a few. Stolen passwords from one site are used to log in to other sites since, sadly, many people reuse their passwords at multiple sites.
One of the most telling results from the survey was that 75% of respondents stated they have noticed an increase in the severity of account takeover attempts over the last 12 months.
And 16.7% stated that they are hearing about scams from their customers. Unfortunately, these cases show companies are neither uncovering nor stopping the attacks before their customers are victimized.
Respondents reported that their account takeover problem results in damage to their brand reputation, financial loss for everybody involved, and a loss in customer loyalty.
Fortunately, the respondents ranked the total cost of remediation (on a scale from 1 to 10) as an average of 4.4, with 100% of respondents noting that the average cost is between $1000-$10,000.
These findings suggest that the account takeover problem is certainly increasing. It is clearly a growing problem that companies must address to reduce their monetary losses and brand damage.
