Cybercriminals use ever-morphing fraud methods over the holidays

The company analyzed over 80 billion behavioral events annually over its customer base, and this month alone, has performed real-time analysis on 40 billion data points.

According to NuData’s intelligence, 60% of new account creations are fraudulent compared to 39% in 2015, and at the login, fraudulent activity increased from 4% to 15%. The results also reveal that account takeover continues to be a big issue for retailers. A 600% increase in login anomalies over this time last year was recorded.

This month alone, NuData warns that they have already seen a 128% increase in sophisticated scripted attacks from hackers gearing up for this holiday weekend. They anticipate that there will be approximately 82 million of these attacks over the same holiday period across the consortium.

Mobile transactions represent a concern for merchants this holiday season, as consumers continue to move to mobile shopping, retailers are trying to balance security and experience. In 2016, mobile device use is trending toward 25% of all purchases. 11% of mobile transactions were high risk in 2015, and this has increased to 32% in 2016, equating to a 190% increase over 2015.

The rate of device and location spoofing behavior has also grown. Organizations relying on device ID and geolocation-based solutions to find risk may be in trouble, as geographical and IP spoofing represented 10% of all risky login activity last fall leading up to Black Friday.

In general, NuData found that account takeover and new account creation attacks are more challenging to detect by traditional fraud teams and many fraudsters are gravitating toward to these tactics for this reason.