Since the early 2000s, social media has grown to become an influential force in almost all aspects of our lives. From communication and entertainment to business and promotion it is an ever-evolving networking mechanism collecting all sorts of information from over 3 billion users around the globe. Therefore, it is imminent that some nefarious figures try to take advantage of this fact using fraudulent activities.
A study published recently by Arkose Labs, a leading fraud and abuse prevention organization, stated that more than half of all social media logins are fraudulent. Arkose Labs helps the worlds most targeted businesses avoid multi-million frauds by using machine learning models to help differentiate between legitimate and fraudulent traffic. In its Q3 Fraud and Abuse Report, Arkose Labs states that an estimated 53.3% of logins on social media platforms are fake along with 24% of all new account registrations.
Arkose Lab researchers analyzed more than 1.2 billion real-time social media interactions for this report. According to Kevin Gosschalk, CEO of Arkose Labs, due to fraudsters having access to more resources to aid in their actions than ever and ever-changing technology, fraudsters can come up with new and efficient ways to go along their business, now more than ever.
According to another report, these social media enabled cybercriminals generates at least $3.25 billion in revenue every year globally.
With social media giants like Facebook and Twitter campaigning against social media fraud, fraudsters keep looking for new ways to work around their adversaries. Targeting online businesses and acquiring seemingly authentic online identities as the company is less likely to be suspicious of old and established profiles than newly created ones.
The report also addresses the concern of Bot attacks, highlighting that the attacks range from large-scale account validation attacks to scripted attacks that scrape user data and inventory.
Another glaring issue is human-driven attacks. China tops the list of top 5 countries attack mix by producing 59.3% human-driven cyber-attacks – that’s even higher than the combined human-driven attacks originating from the U.S., Russia, Indonesia and the Philippines. While the Philippines is the single biggest attack originator across both automated and human-driven.
The goal of cyber fraud is financial gain and while bots save the fraudsters from paying the labour, human-driven attacks have better chances of exploiting the target for valuable information. A prime example would be the travel industry, which is heavily targeted by bots. The report states that almost 10% of all login attempts and 46.6% of all payment transactions to travel sites are fraudulent.
