Account takeover (ATO) incidents have surged, posing a significant threat to businesses across all industries. A recent study revealed that ATO fraud has risen by over 300% for online merchants yearly, underscoring the urgency for robust security measures. 

This type of fraud leads to financial losses and damages a company's reputation, eroding customer trust. Businesses must consider implementing a fraud prevention solution to detect and prevent account takeover attacks. We'll discuss what account takeover is, how account takeover works, and ways businesses can prevent ATO attempts. 

What is account takeover?

Account takeover (ATO) occurs when an unauthorized party gains access to a user's online account, often through stolen login credentials. This breach compromises personal and financial information, enabling the attacker to conduct fraudulent activities under the guise of the legitimate account holder.

Why is account takeover protection important?

Account takeover protection is crucial for businesses as it helps prevent significant financial losses due to fraudulent transactions, which can damage the business' trustworthiness and rating. It also plays a vital role in protecting their customers' identities from identity theft.

What is the account takeover process?

Understanding fraudsters' sophisticated strategies to execute account takeovers is crucial for developing an effective defense. Let's discuss these malicious actors' steps to conduct an account takeover successfully

1. Credential acquisition

Attackers employ deception methods like phishing, tricking users into divulging login credentials through deceptive emails or websites, and social engineering, manipulating individuals to reveal personal information. They also exploit data breaches, accessing vast amounts of login details leaked from insecure databases, setting the stage for widespread account takeovers.

2. Account compromise

Once attackers acquire credentials, they often use brute force or credential stuffing attacks, attempting multiple password combinations until they gain access or exploit security weaknesses such as outdated software or unpatched vulnerabilities to bypass authentication mechanisms. These tactics enable unauthorized entry into accounts, allowing attackers to execute fraudulent activities or steal sensitive information.

3. Maintaining control and covering tracks

To retain access and avoid detection, fraudsters often change account passwords and security questions to lock out the legitimate user while shielding their presence through methods such as a VPN. These techniques ensure they can prolong their malicious presence and continue exploiting the compromised accounts undetected.

How can businesses protect against account takeover?

Preventing account takeover is a must and is a multi-faceted approach, like all fraud prevention strategies. Here are five suggested prevention strategies. 

Implement Strong Password Policies

Enforcing robust password policies, including the mandate for complex passwords that combine letters, numbers, and symbols and require regular updates, significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized access by making it more challenging for attackers to guess or crack passwords.

Set Rate Limits on Login Attempts

Implementing rate limiting on login attempts restricts the number of guesses an attacker can make within a given timeframe, significantly reducing the effectiveness of brute force attacks to crack passwords. This security measure deters attackers by increasing the time and effort required to breach accounts, protecting user accounts from being compromised.

Use Advanced Authentication Methods

Advanced authentication methods, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), security tokens, and app-based authentication, introduce an additional layer of security by requiring users to provide two or more verification factors to gain access. This significantly reduces the risk of account takeovers, even if a password is compromised, by ensuring only the legitimate user can authenticate through something they know, have, or are.

Sandboxing

Sandboxing isolates potentially malicious activities within a secure, controlled environment, preventing attackers from accessing or compromising critical systems and sensitive data during an account takeover attempt. This containment strategy ensures that any threat posed by suspicious code or applications is neutralized before it can inflict damage or breach security parameters.

Use an account takeover solution 

Specialized account takeover solutions employing machine learning and behavior analysis can accurately detect unauthorized access attempts by analyzing patterns and deviations from normal user behavior. This proactive approach enhances security by identifying and responding to threats in real-time and minimizes false positives, ensuring legitimate users are not inconvenienced.

How an account takeover solution like Fingerprint prevents ATO

A fraud prevention solution doesn't need to be added to the user experience. Learn how device intelligence solutions can protect against fraud but keep customer intrusion low. 

Behavioral analytics

Behavioral analytics monitors user actions to detect deviations from normal activity patterns, identifying unusual behavior that may indicate an account takeover (ATO) attempt. This enables organizations to implement proactive defense measures, such as triggering additional authentication checks or alerting security teams, to prevent unauthorized access before any damage can occur.

Device fingerprinting

Device fingerprinting involves collecting specific information about a user's device, such as the operating system, browser type, IP address, and more, to create a unique identifier for that device. This identifier is then used to detect anomalies in access patterns, such as attempts to access an account from an unrecognized device, helping to prevent unauthorized entries by flagging or blocking these attempts.

Smart Signals

Fingerprint's Smart Signals harness the power of data-driven device intelligence to help businesses proactively detect and prevent sophisticated fraud by providing real-time, actionable insights. This technology ensures a seamless experience for trusted users while effectively identifying and mitigating fraudulent activities. Discover how Smart Signals can enhance your security measures.

Reducing false positives

ATO solutions employ machine learning algorithms to analyze user behavior patterns over time, accurately distinguishing between legitimate and suspicious activities, thus minimizing false positives. Additionally, they incorporate multi-factor authentication challenges selectively for activities that significantly deviate from the norm, ensuring legitimate users experience minimal inconvenience while upholding high-security standards.

Integrations

Fingerprint's device intelligence platform enhances business security by integrating cloud services for robust bot detection and protection across web and mobile applications. Fingerprint integrates with numerous services to allow real-time device fingerprinting, leveraging unique device identifiers to identify and mitigate fraudulent activities accurately, thus safeguarding digital identities and transactions.

Prevent ATO attacks while ensuring seamless user experience with Fingerprint

Fingerprint device intelligence stands as a crucial barrier against Account Takeover (ATO) by providing a highly stable and accurate visitor identifier. Its sophisticated device intelligence platform offers businesses an unparalleled layer of protection, minimizing the risk of fraud while enhancing user trust.