RSA Report: Mobile App Fraud Transactions Increased Over 600 Percent in Three Years

Today, RSA 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.

While our 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 RSA 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 (Read more...)