Introducing Kaspersky Fraud Prevention

It’s probably worth noting, Kaspersky Fraud Prevention is technically not for you. It’s actually a protection platform designed to protect banks and other companies in the business of conducting or facilitating financial transactions on and offline. That said, the platform is designed to protect the machines of financial organizations as well as the machines of their customers.

Here’s the problem: financial malware and cyber-attacks are getting more targeted, complicated, and difficult to prevent. Banks and payment processors do the best they can, implementing new security measures to fight new attacks on a regular basis. Unfortunately, cyber-criminals develop new attacks bypassing these defensive methods just as, if not more regularly.

Traditional financial security measures – including one-time passwords, tokens and CVV2 (credit card security codes) – are no longer enough to defend against new cybercrime techniques, because current banking Trojans are capable of bypassing all of these security technologies.

There is no shortage of attack surfaces either. Organizations and their customers are accessing online banking systems from an expanding selection of devices – and this expansion isn’t likely to slow down. On these devices there is an unmeasurable potential for possible software installations. All of this software and all of these devices are vulnerable. Many of these vulnerabilities are exploitable. And thus, cybercriminals are targeting non-traditional devices more and more.

In fact, the costs associated with online theft measure well into the hundreds of millions when you take into account both direct financial loss and the other costs associated with such losses. According to B2B International’s 2013 Consumer Security Risks Survey, 98 percent of respondents regularly used online banking, online shopping, or e-payment services; 38 percent of respondents carried out financial transactions from their mobile devices; and 59 percent of respondents worried about online banking fraud.

If the banks only had to worry about their own systems, maybe there wouldn’t be this much online theft. Unfortunately, they have to worry about their customer as well. Customers don’t have IT security teams. Customers aren’t always so good about patching their machines. Not all customers are good about running the antivirus software that would protect them from most attacks on their traditional computers, let alone the mobile devices they also use for online transactions.  Some customers just aren’t very good at security.

Criminals view customers as the weakest link in the online banking security chain. Therefore, it’s easier for them to make money by stealing from individual online banking accounts than it would be to steal directly from an online banking service. In either case the banks are often left to foot the bill, though it seems that many online banking customers think their bank will always pay for cybercrime-related losses. Let me be very clear: the banks are not always willing to recover these losses for their customers.

Kaspersky Fraud prevention would ease the burden of protection for both financial organizations – by providing them with a robust set of security tools and solutions – and their customers – by making sure that their computers have adequate protection as well. In some cases, Kaspersky Fraud Prevention will amount to free antivirus protection for user machines courtesy of their banks. To the more security conscious users out there that already run security software, Kaspersky Fraud Prevention will work in concert with those programs to supply even stronger security, regardless of who makes the products and without further stressing the user’s computer resources.

Kaspersky Fraud Prevention combines Kaspersky Lab’s global security intelligence and innovative security technologies – to provide rigorous, multi-layered security for online banking and mobile banking transactions. Kaspersky Lab anti-fraud technologies deliver protection at both the bank’s internal processes and the banking customer’s endpoint – regardless of whether the customer uses a Windows, Mac, iOS or Android-based device.

In addition, specialist monitoring, reporting and educational services provide the latest intelligence on the global threat landscape – and enable knowledge transfer from Kaspersky Lab’s anti-fraud security experts, to the bank’s security team.

Of course, each bank has it’s own needs, so Kaspersky Fraud Prevention ships with a software developers kit (SDK). The kit provides the bank’s IT security team with all the tools they need to configure Kaspersky Fraud Protection into their unique environment with its various machines and existing software.

In the end, Kaspersky Fraud Prevention is designed to prevent costly security incidents and save banks and their customers’ money. As we mentioned above, it is not always the case that banks will repay their customers for cybercrime-related losses, but – have no doubt – someone is always losing money when cybercriminals succeed. For this reason, Kaspersky Fraud Prevention aims to ease the burden of protection for both banks and for their customers at the same time.