Account Takeover Prevention – What You Need to Know

Account takeover attacks are a significant source of digital fraud. In addition to costing organizations millions in lost revenue, these attacks strain customer relationships and damage a business’s reputation.

A robust account takeover prevention solution should flag user exposures from 3rd party breaches well before scanners, crawlers, or forum scrapers find them and prevent credential stuffing. It should use adaptive visual challenges to thwart human cybercriminals, sap their resources, and stop attacks.

Change Your Passwords

Account takeovers (ATO) are a shape of identification theft that takes place when horrific actors advantage to get admission to online bills with the use of stolen credentials. Cybercriminals normally use their debts to withdraw money, make purchases, or steal data they can promote or use to compromise other debts. This opportunistic fraud includes social media, email, shopping, bank, credit card, and government benefit accounts.

The good news is that the right safety solutions can prevent criminals from gaining access to consumer credentials. For example, a password exchange notification dispatched to a user in actual time can alert them that their account has been compromised and activate them to behave. A solution that compares new users’ credentials against a database of breached passwords can also flag these users and prevent them from signing up.

In addition, preventing credential stuffing by limiting the rate of login attempts per user or device can help combat account takeovers and other attacks that leverage stolen data. Implementing a solid authentication framework that includes multifactor and two-factor authentication, sanitizing input, and limiting proxies/VPN usage can further increase the security of user accounts.

Aside from the monetary costs, account takeovers can also hurt businesses by impacting brand image and customer trust. This damage can last years and even drive customers to competitors.

Change Your Email Address

Once a fraudster has gained access to an account, they can do anything from changing the email address and password to making unauthorized transactions that result in financial harm. The most common reason hackers want to take over accounts is to steal money from their victims by making unauthorized payments or transfers.

Fortunately, many of the same best practices that prevent identity theft can also reduce the risk of an account takeover. In particular, using unique and secure passwords (with 2FA and authenticator apps) is a good idea; never reuse credentials across accounts and change them periodically. Additionally, a Dark Web scanner can help you identify whether your information has been leaked online and can be used to commit account takeovers or other fraudulent activity.

While there is no failsafe protection against account takeover, a robust and scalable solution to detect and mitigate such attacks requires constant monitoring of every employee and consumer account, a continuous cross-check of user logins against a database of breached credentials, and real-time alerts. Those tools should also allow users to check and update their personal information quickly, monitor changes to their accounts, and receive notifications of potential suspicious behavior. Finally, a robust solution will be able to track location and device data to quickly detect and block the rate of login attempts from unusual devices or locations.

Change Your Phone Number

The best way for account takeover prevention is by combining multiple prevention methods. This includes a security solution that monitors all user activity and flags changes that are likely to be fraudulent. This type of solution should be able to identify a user’s device (based on the configuration of software and hardware), flag suspicious behavior such as rapid succession of non-monetary changes, and spot connections between users by utilizing devices, geolocation, and other behavioral data.

Fraudsters use stolen credentials purchased on the dark web from data breaches to wreak havoc in victims’ lives. They can make purchases, sell data and information ac, cess financial accounts, and steal money, assets, or identities. Criminals can also use the stolen data they gain from one account takeover to infiltrate other accounts.

People need to change their phone numbers if they change jobs or phones. This will help ensure they don’t continue receiving messages for old accounts, allowing them to nip fraud in the bud. It’s a good idea to go through the list of apps and software on a person’s device and delete any that are no longer used. This will help ensure that the new phone number is not operated by anyone else.

The best way to stop account takeovers is by deploying a comprehensive security solution that provides a combination of solutions for all verticals. This includes a combination of human intelligence, deep research, and a robust database of 3rd party breaches. In addition, it should be able to find your user exposures before they’re discovered by scanners and web crawlers and well before the data is sold on the underground.

Check Your Credit Report

A cybercriminal who has taken over an account — whether it’s your financial institution account, social media, or e-mail account — can use your account to thieve cash, non-public facts, and more. This is an extreme problem for victims, who regularly don’t recognize their money owed has been compromised till too overdue.

The good news is that there are ways to prevent account takeovers. One simple step is to be meticulous with passwords. Having a unique, complex password for every online account can help to make it more difficult for hackers to crack your login credentials. Another helpful tactic is to use multifactor authentication whenever possible. You can thwart many attacks by enabling security on your accounts to send you a one-time code via email or text.

Fraudsters are constantly developing new tricks to hijack accounts and steal data. To stop them, you need to have a fraud prevention system with continuous monitoring and can flag suspicious activities like rapid changes to a user’s account. This can include everything from changing a payee to making a wire transfer. A fraud detection system that can also identify device fingerprinting — a method of identifying devices by looking at software and hardware configuration, including the types of plugins installed — can spot unusual activity.