Cybercrime on the rise as account takeovers become leading method

Cybercriminals are becoming more prolific and evolving their methods of committing fraud, necessitating robust defensive action from consumers.

Third-party account takeovers have emerged as the leading type of fraud reported by clients in 2023, according to the newly published LexisNexis Risk Solutions Cybercrime Report. Almost three in ten of the cyber frauds reported involved the account login stage and attacks at this stage were up 18% year-over-year.

Bot-initiated attacks maintained a steady 2% year-over-year growth to reach 3.6 billion as increasingly successful detection and prevention of these attacks has limited their growth, but human-initiated attacks surged by 40% in volume to 1.3 billion.

North America is a key target for cybercriminals and ecommerce transactions are where significant vulnerability lies.

“Cybercriminals continue to increase the scale and complexity of their illegal operations, with dedicated scam centers becoming a permanent fixture to mount digital attacks on consumers worldwide,” said Stephen Topliss, vice president of fraud and identity, LexisNexis Risk Solutions. “While these scam centers will continue to drive the threat of human-initiated attacks, organizations cannot afford to be complacent about the growing sophistication of bots, which can display more human-like behavior to evade traditional prevention solutions. By focusing on identifying advanced bots in real time, businesses can mitigate their ability to create fraudulent accounts or test stolen login credentials for future account takeover attacks.”