05/26/2020

Why Fraudsters Like ‘Delivery Attacks,’ And Why AI and ML Alone Won’t Stop Them

PYMNTS.com

The pandemic — and specifically, the lockdowns resulting from it — has spurred criminals to shift their cyber fraud schemes to exploit new avenues of attack.

To that end, the bad guys lie in wait, and then like everyone else, come out of isolation — only in the bad guys’ case, it is to begin attacks in earnest, as Carl Tucker, vice president of managed risk services at CyberSource, a Visa solution, told PYMNTS in an interview.

Fraud and hacking are becoming most prevalent in areas like card attacks, account attacks and — in a nod to the pivot toward eCommerce — delivery attacks.

Drilling down into various attack vectors, said Tucker, we can see various patterns in how fraudsters ply their trade, and where we’ll see spikes on the other side of the pandemic.

“Card testing, a facet of card attacks, is really related to gathering information,” he said. The fraudsters are trying to verify that a stolen credential is valid. And on the account side, Tucker said there has been an acceleration in phishing scams.

“We are seeing fraudsters building out what we call ‘dormant’ accounts,” Tucker told PYMNTS.

As he illuminated, criminals will set up customer accounts and let those accounts establish relationships with a merchant, who then can be lulled into thinking they are dealing with a longtime customer who is worthy of a higher degree of trust and perhaps more relaxed fraud strategies.

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