I recently read a news story in my daily news feed about litigation between a bank and corporate customer related to an account takeover, and the liability of the loss from a fraudulent transfer. Unfortunately, it seems that I am reading these types of stories far too often these days.

Online corporate account takeovers are an important issue in the payments risk world and have been the subject of our blog in the past. Even with stringent security procedures in place, including two-factor authentication (2FA) and out-of-band verification, companies remain high-risk targets. Undoubtedly, employees will slip up and procedures will be ignored, actions that ultimately result in fraudsters getting their hands on account or network credentials that give them access to corporate bank accounts. Although ongoing and comprehensive employee education is vital, improving authentication techniques and requiring their use are critical to better mitigate online account takeover risks.

Requiring some form of authentication is better than requiring none. Yet the current state of our “some” generally consists of a user name coupled with knowledge-based authentication of a password and, if 2FA is being used, usually a set of challenge questions. Knowledge-based authentication is often ineffective due to the use of weak passwords and the ability of fraudsters to find answers to challenge questions through public sources or social engineering. So then, what is the most effective and reasonable authentication standard moving forward? Biometrics? Security tokens? Dynamic password generators?

Fortunately, both the public and private sectors are working to develop improved authentication solutions. The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) is a federal initiative developed to encourage collaboration between the public and private sectors in developing interoperable technology standards and policies whereby individuals and organizations can be authoritatively authenticated. In addition, the FIDO (Fast Identity Online) Alliance is a private-sector initiative created to change the nature of online authentication by developing specifications that will supplant the reliance on passwords. I do not know whether any of these groups or another entity will be successful in solving our authentication challenge, but I do know fraudsters are hoping their success isn’t any time soon. What are your thoughts on improving online authentication?

Douglas A. KingBy Douglas A. King, payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed