Rippleshot Blog

Home Chef, a Chicago-based meal kit and food delivery company, announced a data breach after a hacker attempted to  sell information on a dark web marketplace.

Home Chef said the last four digits of a customer's credit card was accessed, as they don’t store complete payment information in their databases. Home Chef emailed affected customers. The company didn’t officially announced how many customers were impacted by the security incident, but the security site Bleeping Computer reported that hackers claimed to be selling a database of 8 million users.

As banks and credit unions grapple with the impact of COVID-19 on their operations, the pandemic disruption is creating new opportunities for fraudsters and additional challenges for financial institutions. During these difficult and rapidly-evolving times, Rippleshot will make available its analysis based on its consortium data of thousands of financial institutions across the U.S.

Rippleshot’s CEO Canh Tran and Chief Data Scientist Randal Cox will share their research on the economic impacts of COVID-19 across the U.S., the evolving fraud trends, and mitigation strategies for your financial institution during a webinar on Wednesday, April 29 at 2pm EST.

The webinar will address:

• The fallout during past pandemics and economic shocks and the current economic impact across the U.S.
• The significant risks to your financial institution, including broad expectations of decreases in transaction volumes over the near term.
• How fraud has increased in frequency and volatility during a period where operations have not kept pace with increased risk.
• Our predictions and mitigation strategies to respond this year to the growing fraud trends.
  

• Synthetic Fraud
• Account Takeover Fraud
• New Account Opening Fraud

During times of uncertainty, fraudsters find new avenues to exploit. This is especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic. To help combat the scams that are often born out of these times of crisis — CUNA, AACUL and  ABA — the organizations that serve financial institutions have created their own resource pages to keep bank and credit union leaders informed. These pages are curated daily to provide the most up-to-date news and tips.

In the wake of uncertainty about the Coronavirus outbreak, banks and credit unions are taking proactive measures to protect and educate their customers and members about what to expect, how to operate and how to minimize financial impact.

To help keep you informed about what bank and credit unions leaders have been sharing, we've gathered this week's top headlines on how the financial institution industry is managing the fallout from the global health crisis.

New insight from Juniper Research indicates that online payment fraud is expected to exceed $200 billion between 2020 and 2024. One key contributing factor is a rising number of synthetic identities created to perpetrate fraud. 

Tracking credit card fraud trends is a standard practice for any financial institution. When tracking that data, it's important to have context of what the last few years looked like, and what that means for future trends across the fraud ecosystem. What's important to track is what types of card fraud are mot prevalent (CP vs. CNP fraud), the rate at which credit card fraud is growing and who it is impacting most. 

Knowing how credit card fraud patterns are evolving can help your financial institution know which tools your team needs to proactively get ahead of these rapidly-growing problems. We break down four key trends: 

The Identity Theft Resource Center's annual report confirmed what we already knew about the state of data breaches: They continue to rise significantly, year-after-year. There is a bit of good news, however, within the ITRC's report: The number of PII and sensitive PII records exposed continues to drop. 

“This year’s report paints a mixed view of the landscape as we continue to work with businesses and consumers alike to thwart cyber criminals and contain their damage,” said Matt Cullina, CyberScout’s EVP of Strategic Partnerships and Managing Director of Global Markets.

Critical payment and credit card data from the Wawa convenience store breach has reportedly made its way to the dark web. Multiple reports, including Krebs on Security and Gemini Advisory, indicate that card data from more than  30 million Wawa customers was listed for sale Jan. 27 on the cybercriminal dark web forum Joker’s Stash.

Wawa acknowledged the reports, and released a statement saying it has "alerted our payment card processor, payment card brands, and card issuers to heighten fraud monitoring activities to help further protect any customer information." Wawa said it is working with federal law enforcement to determine the scope of the exposed Wawa-specific customer payment card data.

A newly published report from the American Bankers Association reveals key themes across the banking ecosystem: Fraudsters keep targeting old habits, while newer trends are gaining traction quicker than ever. 

The ABA's report showed is that popular fraud trends like check fraud and deposit account fraud continue to contribute to overall fraud losses — accounting for roughly $2.5 billion collectively. The report also details how point-of-sale debit card fraud trends have been shifting over the past few years. When comparing 2016 to 2018 figures, data indicates that POS debit card fraud from counterfeit frauds now accounts for 25% of the losses, compared to 47% in 2016. Looking at card-not-present transactions (CNP), those losses are account for 42% of counterfeit fraud, when compared to a 30% loss in 2016. 

Despite the gloomy outlook on many of the fraud figures, the report indicated some bright spots for financial institution leadership.

Another major data breach was announced this week. This time it was Landry’s Inc., a Houston-based company that owns and operates more than 600 restaurants, hotels, casinos and entertainment destinations. According to what has been publicly reported, malware was installed on Landry’s’ payment processing system servers, and was used to exfiltrate customers’ card numbers, expiration dates and internal verification codes.

Midway through December, data indicates holiday fraud is rising sharply as expected.

The latest data from Digital Transactions indicates that over the five-day holiday shopping period there was a 29% increase in suspected fraud when compared with the same time period in 2018. This uptick in fraud comes with increased holiday spending, particularly online. 

Black Friday brought in $7.4 billion in just e-commerce sales, with Cyber Monday clocking in a record $9.4 billion. That was a 20% increase in spending from 2018, according to Adobe Analytics. For suspicious transactions Black Friday appeared to be the most impactful day of all, accounting for both the most fraud and legitimate sales (26% of the four-day total).

It's clear fraudsters are following shopper's habits. As more and more shoppers spend online, so does the amount of fraudulent attempts across CNP channels.

The uptick in holiday shopping card fraud leaves financial institutions in a tough position: Manage the fallout from higher declines or take on additional fraud risk to minimize cardholder disruption. Getting proactive about holiday card fraud can alleviate that burden.

To help you keep your cardholders protected, we've brought back our team's tips on how to manage incidents during this peak fraud season.

News broke this week that Macy's online payment portal on its ecommerce site was hacked by Magecart, a cyber criminal group known for injecting payment card skimmers into ecommerce websites. From what's been reported, we know payment data stolen was submitted by shoppers onto payment/checkout pages. 

Macy’s reported that it received an alert about "a suspicious connection between macys.com and another website,” which led to an immediate investigation. The hacker group reportedly injected computer code onto two pages at macys.com: The checkout page if credit card data was entered and an order was placed, and the wallet page of a shopper’s account page.

The questions left for financial institutions is what can they do about it, how can they protect their cardholders and how can they protect themselves in the future? We answer those questions in our latest breach alert.