Surfacing Unseen Threats: Real-Time Visibility Is The Key To Better Security

The fraud prevention and cybersecurity profession sometimes fixates time and attention on the most complex and sophisticated hacks. Topics like deep fakes or the use of AI-generated “liveness checks” are interesting emerging risks, but they can also create the perception that these emerging tactics are why more people are getting scammed, hacked, or defrauded.

Instead, it’s astonishing how many digital businesses and their applications get security fundamentals wrong, when in fact these gaps represent far more pressing risks to the business. One key security fundamental is observability, which is what I most often see missing from digital businesses. You can’t identify a vulnerability and remediate it if you can’t observe it in the first place. And the faster you discover it, the more successful you’ll be to prevent far more costly downstream damage across your business.

For example, much attention and resources are placed on monetary fraud and financial transactions. When successful fraud happens, it’s usually money that people lose, so many solutions are now available to protect the monetary transaction. In fact, a wide range of financial industry safeguards, solutions and vendors now exist in a crowded field providing numerous options to secure transactions from end to end.

However, upstream of the financial transaction is a security fundamental that is often overlooked. Nearly 100% of fraudulent transactions start with a user account compromise of some sort. Taking over an account is frequently the first step in committing monetary fraud, but visibility and observability to that upstream account compromise is usually lacking. This security fundamental oversight allows for more significant downstream damage in the form of financial transaction fraud to occur.

Authentication systems, whether IAM systems or custom-built login applications, are focused on  providing user access. However, observing the user’s actions post-login is a gap in almost every system. This lack of visibility enables fraudulent actors to prepare for a wide range of downstream fraud to take place.

Think of it this way: you wouldn’t let a stranger through the front door of your house without first figuring out who they are (this is what IAM and authentication systems do). But once you allow them in, you wouldn’t give them free rein of your house without monitoring their actions for anomalous behavior to ensure they aren’t stealing your belongings (and this is where IAM falls way short).

Visibility into what users are doing after they log in matters. Understanding what is “normal” for an account from a signaling standpoint is crucial. Visibility into user behavior that deviates from normal behavior or follows certain risk patterns is essential for discovering and preventing fraud before it occurs.

At Verosint, we provide the missing security fundamentals of observability and fraud discovery in a proactive, real-time solution. When fraud occurs, there is almost always a signaling precursor leading up to it. To protect against account fraud, you need to see these signals and process them in real time. This is where Verosint comes into play. We provide visibility that compliments your existing IAM system and provides upstream, proactive fraud discovery and prevention before bad actors have a chance to conduct financial fraud, platform fraud, and a range of other terms of services violations or abuses of your digital business and your users.

Find out more at Verosint.

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