Growing Mobile Use Among Consumers Is Attracting More Criminals, Says New Report

Growing consumer use of mobile devices like smart phones is making the devices more attractive to criminals trying to capture payments data. That’s the assessment from ThreatMetrix Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based data-security company, in its “Cybercrime Report: Q2 2015” report, which analyzed more than 75 million attacks that were detected and stopped.

The most common type of mobile-device attack is spoofing, where a criminal attempts to impersonate a mobile device. That happened in 9.7% of the attacks in the second quarter, ThreatMetrix says. Attacks on Android devices accounted for 2.8% of threats, followed by 2.2% for Windows mobile devices, 2.2% for iPhones, and 1.7% for iPads.

“The overall mobile usage has reached the critical mass to justify the ROI for using criminal resources to attack the mobile platforms,” Vanita Pandey, ThreatMetrix senior director of strategy and product marketing, tells Digital Transactions News via email. “Said simply, mobile transactions have now reached the volume that can justify organized attacks toward the devices and platform.”

The proliferation of mobile devices also makes stolen digital-identity informationeven more valuable to criminals, Pandey says.

In other findings, the report, which analyzes more than 1 billion monthly transactions made by ThreatMetrix clients, finds that financial services institutions continue to be the top target for criminals. ThreatMetrix detected 25 million attacks on financial institutions in the second quarter, approximately 30% more than in the first quarter.

Given the quick adoption of digital banking, many financial institutions continue to use technology like browser fingerprinting—uniquely identifying a Web browser using certain data—that criminals can easily bypass, Pandey says. “As a result, cyber attacks are growing in size, complexity, and risk,” she says.

Another factor is the growth in malware—software meant to surreptitiously gather data—targeting individuals and businesses. “Financial institutions are one of the biggest targets for these malware attacks, with some designed specifically for them,” Vandey says.

Part of the reason for that is that if a criminal successfully finds a way into a bank account, he immediately gains access to funds, she says. E-commerce transactions, while popular, don’t have the same immediacy because goods still need to be shipped, she says, before they can be received and possibly resold.