Banks’ current measures against cyber fraud are falling short – and the numbers don’t lie. With a hyperactive threat landscape, what steps should financial institutions take to maximize cybersecurity?
As the conduits of digital presence and payments diversify—due to an increasing number and variety of assets, perimeters, and interconnected systems—vulnerabilities are growing exponentially, putting pressure on financial institutions in Asia Pacific (APAC) to ensure robust security.
Cybercriminals are becoming increasingly active in the APAC region. In fact, cybercriminal activities are predicted to cost victims approximately US$3.3 trillion by 2025. To effectively prevent fraud, the industry must adopt a more forward-thinking approach that focuses on monitoring and stopping fraudulent activity before it even begins. This requires moving away from siloed strategies and embracing a collective defense model that enhances collaboration and information sharing across stakeholders to combat fraud at a regional scale.
However, this means cybersecurity teams today are also tasked with the immense challenge of reducing fraud in addition to their regular duties. Naturally, for teams that were originally established in large banks to handle transaction monitoring and flag compliance irregularities, leading a digital trust and safety agenda is a paradigm shift. Ensuring cybersecurity teams are adequately upskilled whilst leveraging cutting edge technology to build advanced and robust anti-fraud defenses is a delicate balancing act.
Fraud prevention teams must devise proactive policies to protect brand integrity, user experience, and online transactions. But are they ready to cope with these additional requirements?
Dealing with new fraud vectors proving to be a tall order
Cybercriminals have increased their appetite and tactics for laundering money, crafting automated and manual attacks, maligning digital assets, and hijacking networks.
Deepfakes bypassing Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, bots masquerading as real users and creating fake accounts, malware and Remote Access Trojans (RATs) accessing customer devices and credentials, mobile banking apps being reverse-engineered and added to app marketplaces, increase in mule accounts with users renting their national identity and bank accounts via Telegram – these are just some of the fraud challenges that have been tracked in APAC by Group-IB over the last six months.
Scam calls are another major issue. There have been innumerable cases of individuals targeted by fraudsters posing as immigration, customs, or police officers and forcing users to share their bank information and credentials.
According to the Global Anti Scam Alliance’s (GASA) Scam Report 2024, it is estimated that USD$688 billion will be lost to scams this year. The Singapore Police Force, in their 2024 midyear report, revealed that scam losses amounted to $385.6 million in the first six months of this year, while the number of reported scam cases increased by over 16 percent. In Malaysia, over RM1.2 billion was lost to scams during 2023 while in Thailand, over 63 billion baht was lost to scams in a 26 month period.
Unite to take action: Prevent exploitation of consumers and brand reputation
Enriching transaction monitoring solutions with session information allows fraud and risk teams in banks to significantly improve their ability to prevent fraud and prepare against new fraud vectors. The solutions allow teams to configure, manage, and deploy new policies based on their own requirements, such as a new fraud mitigation policy before a holiday season, a policy to specifically raise checks on transactions from a geo-location, or even a policy based on a host of other device and behaviour signals.
As digital economic activity and growth increases across the APAC region, it is crucial for banks and financial institutions to enhance their cybersecurity regulatory and technical strategies and capabilities to keep pace with the rising opportunities for cybercrime. Such a posture calls for multi-faceted collaboration between the banking and financial services industry, the cybersecurity industry, law enforcement agencies, governments, and other key stakeholders. It is more urgent now than ever before for banking and financial services institutions across APAC to collaborate with cybersecurity firms to obtain the critical insights and actionable intelligence they need to empower their fraud teams to stay ahead of evolving threats.
