Fight Against eFraud Demands ‘Hardened’ Technology Platforms- Isiavwe

Technology platforms must be hardened with layered security; encryption and tokenization to ensure that the payments systems are safe, said David Isiavwe, President, Information Security Society of Africa Nigeria (ISSAN), adding that organizations must have adequate firewalls and end-point security to ensure enterprise wide protection.

 The global economy loses USD455Bn annually. Juniper research recently predicted that the rapid digitization of consumers’ lives and enterprise records will increase the cost of data breaches astronomically to $2.1 trillion globally by 2019, increasing to almost four times the estimated cost of breaches in 2015.

Isiavwe made the remark during his presentation titled: Addressing ePayment Fraud: Exploiting the Technology, at the 7th Annual Payment Systems & Fraud Conference 2016 organised by E-PPAN in Lagos on Tuesday, stressing that frauds are expected to increase – “as cyber criminals will follow the money in an integrated manner onto the ePayments space”.

He warned delegates at the conference that fraudsters constantly rehash old fraud schemes with a little variation in their modus operandi to carry out their attacks on unsuspecting users, with the results leading to surge in Card Skimming; Phishing Sites; DDoS attacks; Ransomeware; Third Party Payment Application Compromise; Rogue Mobile Applications and System Abuse by Rogue Merchants.

He listed current disturbing issues with regards efrauds in the ecosystem to include: “On Friday 21st October, a DDoS attack on Dyn Inc, an internet domain directory, took major sites like Amazon, Twitter, Netflix and Paypal offline. New World Hackers have claimed responsibility for the attack which they said was in the magnitude of 1.2 terabits per second,  which is  double the strength of the attack which took down kerbsonsecurity.com last month;

“In an essay titled ‘Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet,’ security expert Bruce Schneier said last month that major internet infrastructure companies were seeing a series of worrying denial-of-service attacks. He said, ‘Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical internet services,’ and "in Q2 2016, attacks continued to become more frequent, persistent, and complex”’.

He said that hence mobile has become the primary means of internet access for the majority of Nigerians online as confirmed in a GSMA ‘The Mobile Economy Africa 2016 report, ‘the number of mobile internet subscribers tripled in the last five years to 300 million by the end of 2015, with an additional 250 million expected by 2020; the use of mobile applications, SMS, USSD and most recently, QR codes for transactions have become common place in the Nigerian epayment space, therefore, “securing the technology is imperative to ensure the continued growth of the use of mobile. The service providers have to ensure end to end encryption of data and more reliable and user friendly authentication”

The ISSAN President said, “With the increase in the use of mobile devices in the ePayment space, there has been an increase in the proliferation of malware targeting smart phones

According to Ars Technica Google Play was recently found to be hosting more than 400 apps that turned infected phones into listening posts that could siphon sensitive data out of the protected networks they connected to’. According to Fortune.com ‘For a ten week period, Bit9 + Carbon Black researchers analyzed over 1,400 malware samples that targeted the Apple operating system.

“They found that 948 of the samples appeared in 2015 compared to 180 samples that were traced back to 2010 through 2014.’ A recent report on iOS malware attacks by the security firm Bit9 + Carbon Black found that more malware affected iOS devices in 2015 than the previous five years combined. Bringing this all home, we need to develop capabilities to identity and if possible block the spread of identified malware. Encryption, Tokenization and Smart authentication need to be employed in the development and deployment of our offerings in the ePayment space”.

According to him, resilient systems have to be deployed for ePayment transaction processing to achieve 99.99% uptime, as these include call center technology as well as intelligent fraud detection and prevention systems to accurately analyze customer behavior and spending patterns with minimal false positives.

Referring to ‘Digital Payment Strategies: Online, Mobile & Contactless 2014-2019 Report’ by Juniper Research, he said that financial industry expects activities in the ePayments space to grow significantly in the next few years as new products are expected to be developed. Indeed, the annual transaction value of online and mobile payments is predicted to hit $4.7 trillion by 2019.

“Experts have also predicted that traditional banks (as we know them today) may not be alive in the next 20 years as the ePayments space would revolutionize banking and take over the financial services space”.

To this end, Isiavwe called for increased smart systems in place for continuous monitoring and incident prevention, detection as well as swift response mechanisms to provide round the clock protection.

“The key is to leverage on technology to ensure that the e-business platforms are safe, reliable and always available to the average consumer”.

Earlier, Onajite Regha, CEO of E-PPAN, said that the risk of e-payments fraud are real and multiplying daily in the country as consumers’ preference continue to shift toward e-payment options for daily transactions activities.

She added that the annual payment systems and fraud conference is designed to be a veritable rallying ground, for all stakeholders in the e-payment value chain to deliberate on payment systems and fraud knowledge.

The annual event is attended by senior level executives across industries such as banking & finance, telecommunication, judiciary, government agencies, healthcare, retail, SMEs and others, who network and brainstorm on the latest trends in technology innovations in electronic payment and learn winning strategies to manage risks and prevent fraud.