Cybercrimes are on the rise. Hardly a week goes by without hearing about some high-level cyber attack. The FBI’s crime complaint center shows us an increase of 69% in cybercrime complaints compared to 2019. While most of us had to completely change our lives since the beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic by reducing our social interactions, staying at home, and transferring all our life online, things were completely different for cybercriminals. For them, the pandemic has been extremely good for “business”.
With our growing presence online their victim pool has never been bigger. Everyone can be a victim, regardless of the size of your business and the industry you are in because they know how to use even the smallest piece of information they get. But the industry that is most in danger is the financial sector. Because of the amount of money they are dealing with on a daily basis it has become the favorite target of a number of different cyber attacks.
While that sector usually included only banks and credit unions, with the introduction of Fintech companies the financial sector is bigger than ever. With the rising popularity of Fintech companies, even people who couldn’t access traditional financial services until now have an opportunity to get access to different financial products and services.
How to keep online lending companies and their users protected against attacks?
All of the organizations that work in customer-not-present environments are aware of how important identity verification for fraud prevention and stopping cyber attacks. In order to ensure the safety of the customers and of course, their business companies need to implement different methods of identity verification. These methods need to be fast, thorough, and accurate, but at the same time, they need to protect confidential data and the privacy of the consumer.
The best methods for identity verification and risk scoring
There are few methods that can be implemented and we will mention 5 most important.
Email Lookup and Reverse Email Lookup
Email lookup and reverse email lookup tools offer a chance to access additional data about your user. With an email lookup tool, you can find someone’s email address by using their personal data like their first and last name or a phone number while by using reverse email lookup you can find users’ personal data by using their email address. With the help of an email look up tool, one can basically verify the identity of a specific email user by acquiring their first name, last name, social media profile, and much more. This can leave online businesses with some sense of security, knowing better who their users and prospects are.
Credit Bureau-Based Authentication
A credit bureau-based authentication method is based on using the data from one or more of the credit bureaus. These companies have a large amount of credit information on consumers that can easily be used for risk scoring. The only downside is that they will not have details about people without a previous credit history, like young people or recent immigrants.
Knowledge-Based Authentication
Knowledge-based authentication (KBA) uses security questions to verify a person’s identity. Questions will be easy for that person to answer, but difficult for anyone else to answer. You can even add additional safeguards by including a specified time limit. The biggest downside of KBA is that due to growing social media presence and by using social engineering it’s getting increasingly easier to discover those answers.
Device fingerprinting
Device fingerprinting is another great method that helps with identity verification and risk scoring as it can help you notice unusual activity from the user and prevent fraud attempts before they even happen. Your devices contain hundreds of different variables that make your device unique and together they create what is known as a device fingerprint. By using device fingerprinting your system can notice the moment something is different with the users’ device fingerprint so you can take the necessary steps to find out what is happening. It is an unobtrusive but extremely effective way of identity verification.
Multi-factor verification
Multi-factor verification requires the user to provide two or more proof of identity before that user is approved. So, for example it will ask users to enter their username and password which they then need to follow by entering a special code that was sent to their phone or that they generate on their token or smartcard. There are different types of multi-factor verification, but this one is the most common for many of the tech giants.
Every business or institution needs to be aware of the security threats they are facing and how to defend against them. Don’t wait until it is too late, educate yourself and start with the first step on protecting your customers, employees, and of course your business.
