It Takes Sharing and Organization to Fight Organized Crime

The amount of money made and lost due to fraud is surpassing the illegal drug trade. A digital arms race has law enforcement officials nipping at the criminals’ heels. Retailers and banks continue to fight criminal hackers, but are being bombarded by advanced, persistent threats that eventually make their way into the network.

There are data breaches every week, and I’d bet every day, but we may not hear about the majority. All of these breaches have a method, signature, or feature in common, which retailers and banks can learn from.

Criminals are organizing like never before. They are learning from each other, sharing information and strategies. When one publicizes an exploit, other criminals execute it, leading law enforcement off in a new direction. It’s like a vicious game of whack-a-mole.

Today, governments around the world are organizing to fight fraud. But what’s even more exciting is that competing banks, retailers, and small businesses are all sharing fraud information to help each other out. These fraud targets are finding strength in numbers.

Oregon-based iovation Inc. has created an exclusive network of global brands across numerous industries, with thousands of fraud professionals reporting more than 10,000 fraud and abuse attempts each day. iovation’s shared database contains more than 700 million unique devices including PCs, laptops, iPhones, iPads, Android, Blackberries—practically every Internet-enabled device that exists.

Many leading banks and big brand retailers use this device reputation service to detect fraud early by not only customizing their own real-time rules to set off triggers, but they leverage the experiences of other fraud analysts to know if the device touching them at this moment has been involved in chargebacks, identity theft, bust-outs, loan defaults, and any other kind of online abuse you could imagine.

Robert Siciliano, personal security and identity theft expert contributor to iovation, discusses another databreach on Good Morning America. (Disclosures)