Using Data To Identify Suspicious User Intent

Identify Suspicious User Intent: Online fraud is everywhere. Have you ever received a spam email asking you to send them your confidential details or to click on the link from the email? Has the Nigerian prince ever offered you a chance to become a millionaire or have you got a text message or an email from your post office that your package is waiting for you, just as soon as you pay the customs fee? These are the most common and therefore more easily recognized types of fraud. We have been encountering them since we started using the internet, so we know that the best defense is just to ignore it. After all, there is hardly anyone that hasn’t encountered online fraud in some way or another. 

But cyber criminals are getting more and more inventive and they are constantly trying to think of new types of cyber attacks. Unfortunately it is getting harder and harder to know what is a legitimate email, website or a link, and what is a fraudulent one. There is hardly a day where you don’t read about a high level cyber attack and the damages the company has experienced due to the attack. It is estimated that by 2025 cybercrime will cost businesses worldwide $10.5 trillion annually. The truth is that global cybercrime is on the rise, and every business is now in danger of becoming a victim. 

In order to fight against cyber attacks and to protect your business or organization, you will need to stop relying on the same old cyber security tactics like before. The key of a successful cyber security strategy is to stay proactive and continuously introduce new cybersecurity tools like data enrichment that can help you to keep up with ever growing threats. Data enrichment helps verify user intent and stops the cyber attacks before they can do any significant damage to your business.

What Exactly is Data Enrichment ? 

Data enrichment is a process of collecting data from various external and internal databases in order to enrich original raw data to gain better insight into the customer. While data enrichment has already been in use for a while by the marketing and advertising department, its potential in cyber security has only been discovered just recently. By using data enrichment businesses can create an unique profile for each customer which makes it easier to verify user intent and recognize account takeover, identity theft or other types of cyber attack. For example, your users need to use an  email address and a password in order to access your site, but with device enrichment you have accessed various databases that can confirm if that email address was involved in a data breach or was put on the blacklist due to a previous attempt of cyber attack. It can even tell you the age of the email and if the email domain is valid or not. Information can provide you with a clearer picture about the intent of your user and it helps you react on time if there are some red flags indicating the user might have malicious intent. Knowledge is power and the more information you have, more informed decisions you can make. By using data enrichment you can notice the red flags that would usually go unnoticed like the user having no presence on any social media or email being registered on a blacklist database and implement a set of rules that will be activated once one or more of the red flags show up.

Once you have identified suspicious user intent you can implement additional levels of protection like multi factor verification which requires the user to verify their identity with additional methods in combination with their username and password. This can be a passcode sent to their phone or email, security question, token that generates unique passwords app on the phone or something else. Options are limitless. Various companies like Google, Amazon or even Coinbase are already using these two cyber tools to protect their customers from ever evolving cyber threats. Don’t wait for something to happen before you react. Be proactive and use all the tools you have at your disposal to protect your company from cyber attacks.

Also Read: Top Benefits of Internet Business Phone System