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Online criminals are not that much unlike honest consumers in adopting mobile Web sites and apps as their favored channels with retailers and financial services. The evidence is that attack rates via mobile sites increased 56% in the latter half of 2019, according to the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Cybercrime Report for the period versus the year before.
And the attack-rate growth on mobile apps more than doubled to 171% in the same period, the report notes. Of the 19 billion transactions covered in the report, criminals were responsible for 401 million, with 66% originating on mobile devices and remainder on desktop.
Within North America, the report analyzed 9.1 billion transactions, of which 167 million were fraudulent. Again, the majority—69%—were mobile. The growth rate on app-based attacks soared 138% over the last six months of 2018.
“Mobile transaction volumes and attack rates are still experiencing strong growth. Mobile-app attack rates have been heavily influenced by global bot activity that can often overwhelm a business’s fraud defenses,” the report says. “These bots are vast, automated, and come from multiple global geographies and were particularly targeting new-account creation transactions during the second half of 2019.”
There was a 293% growth in the attack volume for new-account creations and a 39% growth in the attack rate. Overall, 17% of new-account creations are attacked, Alpharetta, Ga.-based LexisNexis Risk Solution says.
Other findings support the notion of cross-organizational, cross-industry fraud. In one month alone more than 73,000 devices were associated with fraud at more than one organization that uses LexisNexis Risk Solutions. The largest single network spanned six countries and included financial services, e-commerce, and media.
