While fraud attack rates targeting land travel and hospitality increased 19 percent last year, the air travel industry has witnessed a significant decrease in such activity.
In fact, according to the new Fraud Attack Index issued by Forter, fraud attack rates tied to the airline industry went down a significant 29 percent during 2018.
Described as an anomaly by Forter, the significant drop could be the result of criminals holding onto vast quantities of stolen data for future use the company said.
“It’s common for a very big breach to take several years for people to start using it,” Michael Reitblat, CEO and co-founder of Forter, told Forbes. “When eBay and LinkedIn were breached it took three to four years. We have seen little use from Equifax or from the Starwood Marriott breach—these two are possibly the worst breaches that have ever happened in retail identity space, Starwood has all your accounts, email, password and information about your stays.”
Forter’s latest report also points out that online fraud is rapidly evolving and fraudsters and fraud attacks are as dynamic as always. Some of the additional highlights of this year’s Fraud Index include:
—Attacks against the food and beverage industry have increased by 79 percent
—Online apparel attacks have increased by 47 percent
—There’s been a 45 percent increase in account takeover attacks.
—Fraud rings have shot up by 26 percent, a symptom of the general trend towards increased sophistication seen throughout the online fraud ecosystem.
—Policy abuse (or compliance abuse) skyrocketed over 2018: an increase of 170 percent
Fraudsters are increasingly using bots to run automatic scams, like mass logins, performing upwards of 100 attacks per second.
