Online Businesses Facing ‘Massive Surge’ in Fake Accounts: Arkose Labs

The holiday season is also cybercrime season, reported fraud deterrence platform Arkose Labs Tuesday. “Attacks have steadily increased over 2020, becoming more frequent, launching on a larger scale, and initiating with greater sophistication,” it said. It projects that 8 million attacks will occur daily during the 2021 holiday shopping season. Fraud “has a new face” in the form of digital businesses “experiencing a massive surge of fake new accounts,” said Arkose. It detected 560 million malicious attempts on “registration flows last quarter,” four times more than at the beginning of the year, it said: “These fake accounts open the doors to downstream fraud that directly impacts the bottom line of e-commerce firms.” As more customers open digital accounts, “account takeover attempts fueled by large-scale credential stuffing soon follow,” it said. In a credential stuffing attack, cybercriminals funnel stolen user names and passwords through an automated process to try to gain access to online accounts. Arkose said it stopped 3 billion credential stuffing attacks over the past year, nearly double the rate of the previous 12 months.