Corporate Treasury Represents a Highly Attractive Target to Fraudsters: BioCatch

It’s a new year, but the digital threats of 2018 remain at large. Accordingly, BioCatch is once again honing in on a specific vulnerability to showcase how sophisticated security technology – namely behavioral biometrics – can be used to guard against such threats.

In its latest blog post, BioCatch puts the spotlight on corporate treasury, calling it “an even more attractive target than most” when it comes to cybercrime. The reasons are pretty obvious: “Treasurers are responsible for the largest transactions at a financial institution and have access to highly-sensitive data,” as the post puts it. And hack attacks can result in the initiation of false payments, or the diversion of funds to fraudsters’ accounts.

Going into more specific threats posed against treasury departments, BioCatch points to social engineering scams in which fraudsters spoof the email accounts of senior executives, leading to serious phishing incidents. The rise of open banking in the UK is another major concern – as BioCatch has argued before – and there’s also a threat posed via the shift toward cloud-based treasury management systems, which can be vulnerable to hack attacks in ways that a client business may not be.

The key to defending against all of these threats is to find a way to address them “in real-time,” BioCatch says. And behavioral biometrics offers a compelling means to that end: By assessing how end users interact with their devices, such technologies can effectively detect fraudsters even when they’re spoofing metadata such as location, phone number, IP address, and so on. For its part, BioCatch notes that its platform “was able to prevent a £1.6M fraudulent transaction from going through by identifying user behavior that diverged from the norm.” That’s a pretty strong indication of the stakes involved in treasury-focused hack attacks, and the value of effective solutions.