We are approaching the end of a year which saw the worst of our fears coming true. It was always assumed that hackers and fraudsters have gotten access to new and powerful information to weaponize their knowledge. Consequently, the every evolving cybercrime ecosystem showed the world its murkier side when Capital one financial corporation was breached and a hacker gained access to more than 100 million capital one customers’ accounts and credit card information.
While analyzing the pattern of attack, the impact of any breach is instantly visible, sometimes it takes numerous months or even years to discover and report a breach. Given, that time is of paramount importance in detecting potential breach organizations around the world have felt the need for a potent vulnerability management system to safeguard their sensitive data.
The severity and the magnitude of the capital one breach, the kind of data that was compromised, along with the customers that have been affected, are having a significant impact on the increasingly complicated and connected cybercrime ecosystem.
Data and analytics are of remarkable value since it has the power and potential to predict the profitability and growth along with predicting the customer’s lifetime value and engagement. Capital One and its employees had understood the value of customer data and mastered the art of putting the data to good use. The same data that was used by capital one to fuel long term growth, target businesses and assess on which customers would provide the most long term value, is now exposed to the dark web and its frightening to foresee a future in which the same data would be used to expand the empire of cybercrime in various ways possible.
History made it evident for us to realize the grim reality of this era, where its not a matter of if rather when an attack of the significance that we saw in 2017 with Equifax would occur again, where the quality of data could accurately paint a picture of one’s financial health and the effects of this fraud shall be felt till posterity.
It is only now that businesses and organizations around the globe understand the importance of each breach in advancing a criminal’s Intel and larger fraud landscape, no matter which part of the world the breach occurs.
The whole cybersecurity ecosystem is data-driven, due to which there are numerous enterprises on the dark web, dedicated to buying and selling of customers data and running identity farms. What organizations don’t understand is that cybercriminals need minimal resources to launch a good attack. These attackers have sophisticated and connected networks that give them easy access to a host of compromised credentials from a group of disconnected attacks. When combined together these attackers have a significant amount of data at their disposal, right from the financial status of a consumer to their beauty preferences. This stand evidence to the fact that attackers have unrivaled insights into consumers, which can be weaponized anytime they like.
The security incident at capital one and Equifax only shows us that a large amount of data is available for access, should attackers carry a potent attack. It is a petrifying reminder that data and digital identity are the two sacred currencies that matter most in this technological era.
With festivities approaching fast, the entire world is heading towards the festive holiday season, which would generate more customer data via various financial and retail networks. One has to be ever vigilant, knowing that the Capital one breach will play a significant role in retail data fraud since the retail and financial sector is susceptible to seasonal and human-driven fraud. It has been noticed that a large amount of these attacks are human-driven, because of the fact that inauthentic human-driven traffic is harder to detect as human behavior is highly unpredictable. One has to register that, unauthentic human fraud is also powered by Data.
An organization’s security battle is not against a specific attacker, an organization or an unknown entity; rather it’s between the company and the connected cybercriminal ecosystem. Cyber fraud and security breaches are evolving and hence, prevention of these attacks by detecting vulnerabilities in your existing network remains to be the only solution to this growing menace.
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