Interest in data theft goes mainstream

It’s not every day that you see banking security reported in a tabloid read by 2.7 million people across the UK, but The Sun’s interest in data theft highlights just how mainstream the topic has become.

We are just a month from Christmas, and one of the most popular presents of the festive season, Microsoft’s X Box LIVE, has been targeted by criminals eager for gamers’ personal and bank details.

The Sun, the UK’s biggest-selling tabloid newspaper, reported that gamers claim X Box LIVE was hacked, although Microsoft refutes this, saying that gamers were the victims of phishing. Either way, the end result is that allegedly the criminals got the details they needed and used them, with average losses of £100 per affected gamer, spending just £42.50 each time which is under the limit that most banks will detect fraudulent activity, according to The Sun.

As I’ve argued before in these blogs, determined criminals will always find clever ways to obtain that data - stopping them from doing so is near impossible. What we can do as an industry however, is to help prevent the fraudsters from being able to use the details they’ve obtained for financial gain. The tools? Context Awareness based on Proximity Correlation and strong multi-factor authentication in conjunction with transaction verification. Banks can play a significant role here too. If misuse of credit card and bank account details for financial gain can be prevented, customers can rest assured that their money is safe even if their data has been compromised.

It’s time to step up and fix the part of the problem that we can fix.