Everything turning into “e” has not only made people’s life simple but also hackers and fraudsters got ways to invade into your details and take over your account.
So, in this article, you will get a deep insight into these types of risks and how the hackers implement them.
What is Account Takeover?
Account takeover, also known as ATO, is a kind of identity robbery. It allows a fraudster to access someone’s e-commerce site, bank account, and other accounts using bots. By successfully taking over one’s account, an individual can perform fraudulent transactions from his/ her victim’s account. And the victim tends to remain completely unaware of this most of the time.
How Does Account Takeover Happen?
There are two methods used commonly by fraudsters for account takeover. They are as follows.
Credential Cracking: Also coined as “brute forcing,” credential cracking (OWASP OAT- 007) is a method to guess the valid credentials by using various passwords and usernames. The names are generally selected from the users’ account lists revealed by hackers and malicious parties. Hackers employ bots for hacking the accounts applying the brute force approach, guessing attacks, and dictionary attacks for identifying updated login credentials. This illegal work can get traced if there are more failed attempts to log in and more user complaints about account hijacking.
Credential Stuffing: The method of credential stuffing (OWASP OAT- 008) exploits consumer’s inclination to use the same password and username at various websites. Hackers use bots to examine the lists of users accessed through data dumps of breached credentials from multiple websites. Most of the time, users seem to use the same credential combination on several sites. Unlike the above method, credential stuffing doesn’t include any such guessing or brute force, but mass login attempts are used to take over their accounts. This method is possible to track if one uses different credentials to perform consecutive logins from the same HTTP user.
The motive behind Account Takeover:
One can takeover accounts for several reasons, while the common of all is monetary gain. The direct cost of this illegal function is evident through fraudulent transactions, fund transfers, or e-shopping functioned from one’s bank account or e-commerce account. Apart from this, account takeover cases can also hamper a brand’s reputation and damage the loyalty and trust of its customers.
How to Prevent Account Takeovers?
There are several approaches that online businesses prefer to eliminate bot traffic and avert account takeover. It includes IP blacklisting, limiting login attempts, CAPTCHAs, a strong authentication process, and configuring rules in a WAF. However, presently there are various off-the-shelf tools introduced for bot detection to protect millions of dollars of large businesses.
Conclusion
Hence, these are some basic yet effective details that can make you aware of getting theft. With a bit of awareness, you can protect your accounts from hackers.