Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting third-party financial aggregation services to steal money from consumers’ online bank accounts and one of the weakest links are passwords. Many people use the same passwords across online accounts and cybercriminals just cycle through names and passwords until they hit the jackpot.
With cybercriminals targeting every part of the banking supply chain, including the consumer, consumers must participate in their own security. That means coming up with a unique password that is used in no other place, changing passwords, and demanding multifactor authentication throughout the banking chain. If users employ the same passwords among all their accounts, then cybercriminals will pick the first lock and the rest of their accounts will go down like dominos.
For financial institutions, it is important to use a layered approach for consumer identity verification combined with emergent technologies such as passive biometrics. To ensure that consumers receive a frictionless experience, it’s important to implement a solution that will identify customers by their online behavior instead of by static credentials which have almost all been compromised in one way or another. This method allows financial organizations to block any fraudulent transactions, even if the cybercriminals have the correct stolen credentials.