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Fraud From Mobile Apps Increased Over 600 Percent in Three Years

By Heidi Bleau posted 05-30-2018 07:55

  

RSA recently released its Q1 2018 fraud report, providing an inside look into the cybercrime and fraud trends observed in the first quarter this year across attack vector, digital channels and region.  One insight that stood out most prominently was the growth of fraud transactions originating from mobile apps – an increase of over 600 percent in only three years – from 5% in 2015 to 39% today.   While part of this increase is likely attributed to greater digitalization of banking and other consumer services, it is clear the mobile channel is still more vulnerable to fraud and requires better protection.

Although the data suggests that mobile is the preferred method for cashing out, fraudsters are increasingly migrating to social media to communicate, trade information, advertise their services, and even create virtual storefronts to sell stolen data.  As reported recently, this activity has continued to spread to new social media platforms in the last year.  Since then, we observed one of the sites covered in our report, Reddit, taking aggressive action to remove this activity from its platform.  Reddit, the well-known social news and media aggregation site, recently banned numerous fraud subreddits forcing fraudsters to move to new platforms.  This development is also covered in our latest report.

Other highlights include:

  • Phishing accounted for 48 percent of all cyber attacks observed by RSA.  Canada, the United States, India and Brazil were the countries most targeted by phishing.
  • Financial malware accounted for one out of every four fraud attacks. 
  • Consumer transactions and fraud continue to grow in the mobile channel.  In the first quarter, 55 percent of transactions originated in the mobile channel and 65 percent of fraud transactions used a mobile application or browser.  Over the course of 2017, fraud by mobile app increased 50 percent.
  • The average value of a fraudulent transaction was up to 152 percent higher than a genuine one.
  • More than 80 percent of observed fraudulent e-commerce transactions originated from a new device. 
To get a full snapshot of all the cybercrime trends observed by RSA, you can download our Q1 2018 Quarterly Fraud Report here.
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