By the time you finish reading this sentence, a financial institution will have fallen prey to a cyberattack. That means significant fraud losses for the organization.
Criminal organizations are attacking faster and hitting harder than ever before. And financial services institutions—with their complex network of digital touchpoints, third-party integrations, and lucrative data—are a prime target for online fraud.
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Fraud Protection for Financial Services
Read the eBook to find out how to deter attackers by disrupting the economics of cybercrime.
The New Business Imperative
For financial services institutions, keeping gross fraud loss in check isn’t a choice—it’s a business imperative. If you can secure your assets, mitigate risk, and stay compliant, you’ll get ahead of your competitors. If you can’t, you’ll incur costly regulatory penalties and irreparable damage to your brand and bottom line.
What’s more, your business and organized crime rings have more in common than you might think: you both worry about ROI. The best way to respond to attackers is to deter their efforts by making their attempts to compromise your business unfeasible.
Automated attacks are cheap and increasingly sophisticated. But with a defense strategy that maintains resilience and effectiveness regardless of how attackers retool to bypass your countermeasures, you can make their efforts too expensive and their success impractical.
The Security Paradox
The paradox at the heart of modern risk management strategy is balancing security with usability. Your goal is to use security to protect your customers. But while strict security and fraud controls may stop some attackers, they will impact the experience for all customers.
Security mitigations like CAPTCHA and SMS-based multi-factor authentication (MFA) introduce friction into the customer experience. When customers are unhappy, it leads to decreased revenue, customer dissatisfaction and increased support costs. Ironically, fraudsters can easily bypass these tools. To keep your account holders happy and prevent fraud at the same time, you need a security strategy that’s more effective and less invasive.
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Deter Sophisticated eCommerce Fraud and Abuse with F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense
Attackers are Evolving — So Should Security
As more customer interactions move to digital channels, attackers are evolving their tactics to defraud financial institutions. Financial institutions need solutions that continuously adapt so they can parse human intent and behavior from bot activity.
With a plethora of automated tools and compromised data available for purchase on the dark web, security often feels like a lopsided game of chess, where attackers get two moves for every one move aimed at improving protection.
Between 2018 and 2020, the F5 Security Incident Response Team noticed that 46% of all reported incidents in the financial sector were brute force and credential stuffing attacks.
The Rise of Automated Fraud - Credential Stuffing and Account Takeover (ATO)
Financial services institutions are seeing an increase in automated attacks like credential stuffing, which lead to account takeover (ATO) and fraud. Attackers are effective at gaining access to customer accounts by using actively exploited or publicly available compromised credentials, bots, and readily available tools. Armed with AI and automation aimed to bypass your defenses, they are executing credential stuffing attacks on a massive scale.
The growing popularity of fintechs like Zelle, DBS PayLah!, and CoverWallet, which use open APIs, has increased the attack surface for most financial services organizations. Threats against open APIs cannot be mitigated with anti-automation defenses alone. Fintech has also complexified the regulatory and compliance requirements facing financial services organizations.
In a report commissioned by F5, Aite Group interviewed risk executives at financial institutions and fintech lenders to learn how they are protecting themselves from the escalating volume of account takeover (ATO) attacks.
THREAT ECOSYSTEM AT-A-GLANCE
It is difficult to mitigate these attacks without compromising customer experience. Traditional access controls like CAPTCHA or Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) can be bypassed and often introduce friction into a user experience.
While you can never eliminate risk, implementing defenses that make your applications more challenging to compromise will greatly increase the probability that criminal organizations will focus their attention elsewhere.
F5’s integrated fraud and abuse platform provides customer safety and trust for over 500 million financial services accounts, 60% of North American consumer banking, including at 9 of the top 15 US banks.
Protection You Can Bank On
You shouldn’t have to choose between delighting your customers and eliminating friction from the user experience.
By protecting the world’s most valuable brands, F5 has unmatched visibility into automated and human traffic. Coupled with machine learning algorithms trained by attack profile, risk surface, and historical fraud records, F5 solutions can accurately distinguish fraudsters from real customers, without friction.
Maximizing Business Potential
Digital transformation is changing everything: how customers behave, where fraudsters focus their attention, and how organizations get ahead. Financial services institutions that fail to adapt face harsh regulatory penalties, customer churn, and lost revenue.
Unlike traditional security and fraud tools, which require extensive manual operation and introduce unnecessary friction, F5 protects your applications from fraudulent activity no matter how attackers evolve, while eliminating friction for real customers.
“F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense is the most trusted application by the banking industry for security and fraud protection. It was an obvious choice to partner with them and set the same high standards for our Open Banking solutions."
-Simon-Pierre Lebel,
Senior Director of IT Operations & Security, Flinks
Combining F5 Online Fraud Prevention with processes and procedures that govern your security and fraud programs will reduce your losses, ultimately making for happier account holders. Learn how Financial Services firms reduce the costs of bot attacks and improve CX with F5 in this new Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study
Motivated criminals often retool and adapt their attacks to circumvent security defenses, using a variety of techniques.
Interested in seeing F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense in action?
Reach out for a complimentary application security threat assessment. Our automation and fraud experts will study your web and mobile applications and provide you with a summary of how attackers can target them.
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Financial Services Security
Robust security for financial services is essential. That’s why 15 of the 15 top U.S. banks use F5 solutions.
Open Banking
Open banking is revolutionizing the way people across the globe interact with their bank. But it’s also opening up financial services to new security threats and performance issues.
Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is the key to getting past legacy scalability and performance constraints and giving customers the exceptional digital experiences they expect.
GRC and Fraud Management
Protecting your applications and staying compliant are essential to being a trusted online presence. One challenge is that financial institutions are one of the most lucrative targets for sophisticated, organized crime rings.