Mobile Attack Rates Up 24% Globally, 44% in US

The proportion of mobile-vs.-desktop transactions has nearly tripled in the last three years, and instances of mobile fraud and cyberattacks have grown as attackers go where their victims are.

More than half (58%) of digital transactions now originate from mobile devices, ThreatMetrix researchers discovered in their Q2 Cybercrime Report 2018. One-third of all fraud now targets mobile, with global attacks up 24% compared with the first half of 2017. The United States saw a far higher growth rate: Mobile cyberattacks increased 44% during the same time period.

The financial services sector has been hit hard with the growth of mobile cybercrime. Of the 81 million attacks to hit the industry in the first half of 2018, 27 million targeted mobile devices as fraudsters capitalize on the rise of mobile banking adoption. The biggest threat to financial services, researchers report, comes from device spoofing. Attackers attempt to trick banks into thinking fraudulent login attempts are coming from new customer devices.

Identity spoofing is a broad problem, especially on social networks and dating websites, which have the highest mobile footprint across industries: 85% of total transactions, and 88% of account creations, for social sites happened on mobile devices. Identity spoofing makes up 13.3% of attacks on this sector; attackers often use proxy servers to trick their victims into thinking they're geographically closer than they are.

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