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01/09/2019

Faster Payments, Open Banking Should Keep Treasurers On High Alert

PYMNTS.com

While financial services (FinServ) innovations often emerge with built-in security measures, new market trends — including faster payments and open banking — are introducing new security threats to corporate treasury departments, according to cybersecurity company BioCatch.

The treasury department is an increasingly attractive target to cyber fraudsters. Account takeover attacks, social engineering tactics and payments fraud all threaten businesses as attackers go after the high-value transactions typical of corporate finance, BioCatch explained in a blog post last week.

Among the most prevalent is the Business Email Compromise (BEC), a type of social engineering attack that received significant attention last year. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has now pegged total losses to BEC scams at $12 billion across 150 countries, marking a 136 percent rise in BEC cases between December 2016 and May 2018.

The tactic is relatively simple. Fraudsters can infiltrate company databases and email accounts to identify which executives would typically initiate a transaction, then pose as that professional to receive company funds without suspicion. However, according to BioCatch, the ongoing progress of corporate financial technology (FinTech) has created new opportunities for fraudsters to steal from their business targets, even as emerging innovations put financial security at the center of their solutions.

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