Companies not protecting financial transactions: Kaspersky survey

• Nonchalance from companies involved in financial transactions and e-commerce
• Only 38% of e-commerce companies willing to invest in tools against online fraud

ACCORDING to a survey conducted by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International, only 52% of financial companies and 46% of firms engaged in e-commerce believe they need to take enhanced measures to protect financial transactions.
 
Even fewer companies in this sector provide protection for their customers’ devices, Kaspersky said in a statement.
 
E-commerce companies are the least focused on protecting financial operations – 16% of them say they are not interested in installing special security solutions against online fraud and only 38% of them are willing to invest in such tools.
 
Overall, 30% of companies working with cash flow on the Internet do not provide and are not planning to provide protection on customer devices during transactions, even though this is the weakest point in the security chain and could lead to clients losing money and companies losing profits and reputation.
 
Also, 28% of companies do not care about installing anti-fraud software on customers’ mobile devices while 30% of companies do not try to protect their own information infrastructure against fraud.
 
This nonchalant attitude to the protection of payments may lead to negative feedback from customers: Three-quarters of users expect financial companies to take responsibility for safeguarding all their devices and 40% of those surveyed are sure the company will reimburse any lost money.
 
However, as Kaspersky Lab statistics show, the number of cyber-threats targeting financial data of individual users is growing constantly.
 
For example, according to Kaspersky Security Network, the amount of attacks using malicious banking software reached 1.4 million during the period between 19 May and 19 June, a 15% increase compared with the period from April 19 to May 19.
 
“Every day, criminals are less likely to rob banks by running in and yelling ‘This is a robbery!’ before shooting at the ceiling,” said Ross Hogan, global head of the Fraud Prevention Division at Kaspersky Lab.
 
“More and more crimes are migrating to the online world. Cyber-criminals target banks by going after the least protected links in the chain – customer devices and the online financial transactions carried out with those devices.
 
“In order to protect customers and their money – and hence the reputation of the company – financial organisations are encouraged to use integrated, multi-layered solutions that provide proactive fraud prevention to maximise effectiveness and optimize user experience.
 
“The use of a unified platform that provides protections both at the customer endpoint and within the bank’s environment provides context-driven, comprehensive prevention that point solutions fail to deliver,” Hogan added.
 
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