Isn’t it more lucrative for bad actors to be looking at e-commerce and online banking? Let’s take a look at how these threat vectors are coming at government agencies.
Historically, e-commerce, along with banks, were the biggest targets for fraud. Above is an example of a fraud network from the H2 2019 Cybercrime Report where we analyzed the events in our global network and looked to see where the fraud was occurring.
The different colors in the network reflect different industries: dark blue is banks or financial institutions, light blue is e-commerce, and green is media, such as streaming media or telecommunications. Note the countries as well – what we’re seeing is that these fraud networks are cross-industry, cross-geography and ultimately they’re looking for where they can get financial gain. Here is an e-commerce example that’s parallel to government services: Airline loyalty programs – For many years, people collected air miles and you couldn’t do much with them aside from buying a ticket or maybe an upgrade. You have to be a brave fraudster to take over an airline account, book a ticket, and then try to get on the airplane. But we’ve seen changes to air mileage programs in the last few years – they can be monetized in a variety of ways now, such as using miles to buy expensive cosmetics free or a large new TV. Suddenly, we have a real problem with fraud in airline loyalty programs. With government services, it’s very similar. Most government services interactions were physically face-to-face, but we’ve seen a shift into the digital space, which has accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic. Fraudsters are absolutely aware of this and see an opportunity because ultimately there’s money to be made from defrauding those services.
