Kaspersky Fraud Prevention: Evolving to Meet Changing Threats

Kaspersky Fraud Prevention was recently at Money 20/20 Europe to display their readiness to work with all types of businesses that want to protect their online accounts, from financial institutions and gaming merchants to airlines and other e-commerce sites. About-Fraud.com discusses below Kaspersky’s approach to fraud prevention with company fraud consultant Emma Mohan-Satta following their appearance at Money 20/20 Europe.

RS: What type of products do you offer merchants to protect them from fraud?

EMS: We offer on-device protection as well as a cloud-based solution that gathers intelligence through an SDK [software development kit] for mobile and JavaScript for browsers. Our analysis can be output to a fraud prevention rules engine or a data management tool for further analysis by the merchant and/or customers by logging in directly to our console to gain further information about suspicious incidents. Our fraud prevention intelligence is designed to complement a merchant’s existing fraud prevention screening, offering an additional layer of intelligence.

RS: How does Kaspersky’s fraud solution differ from the machine learning fraud startups getting a lot of buzz in the market?

EMS: Kaspersky Fraud Prevention believes that machine learning is a valuable tool for understanding vast amounts of data for a specific purpose. However, we power our technology through human intelligence to ensure we have a clear picture of the evolving threat landscape and to ensure our solution continues to meet the needs of our customers while understanding the newly-emerging attack vectors. Thanks to our lengthy experience in cybersecurity and our strength in threat-research globally, we are uniquely positioned to offer a truly cutting-edge fraud solution by layering multiple types of analysis (behavioral, biometric, environmental, device and malware) in a user-centric way.

This allows us to detect threats in ahead of time before a fraudster has even had the opportunity to reach the transaction stage. Our technology complements rules engines as an additional layer of intelligence for decision-making. Since we are focused on identifying threats as early as possible, we can also be used in complement to other fraud prevention offerings focused on the later stages of the process such as those with chargeback-guarantee models.

RS: What is your biggest obstacle in dealing with clients? Do you face any issues selling a fraud prevention solution from a company based in Russia?

EMS: Kaspersky Lab is a truly global cybersecurity company with offices in almost 200 countries and territories around the world. We have the ability to hire staff in the location where they are most needed by our customers and where the skill-set best suits the requirements, so our company culture is not focused on one specific region.

We identify attackers and threats from all across the world on a daily basis. If all cybercriminals came from one place as the media might like to portray, us fraud prevention professionals would have a much easier job! Our biggest challenge – and the one that makes working in this team exciting – is making sure we’re always improving our knowledge of fraud threats and making sure our technology is consistently at cutting edge when it comes to preventing fraud.

RS: What technology or features beyond machine learning do you think will become popular in fraud prevention in the future?

EMS: Anyone who attended the Money 20/20 European conference, as we did, will know that there is a lot of talk in the industry about deep learning and artificial intelligence. Meanwhile the big data and machine learning trends continue. What’s important for us is to harness those technologies for a particular purpose rather than adding them as the latest buzzwords in a list.

We believe our ability to detect threats before the transaction occurs will become increasingly important in fraud prevention. By detecting threats before they reach transaction or chargeback stage, we can make a real difference to the customer journey – reducing friction for genuine users and reducing the overall business impact of fraud by preventing fraudsters from ever gaining access to customer accounts and data.

RS: What should people in our ecosystem be expecting from Kaspersky’s fraud solution in the next 12-18 months?

EMS: From our latest B2B Financial Threats survey we know that more and more businesses are expecting their customers to go mobile in the next three years. Supporting businesses secure their journey into this space is one of our priorities and so we’re focusing on innovating new ways to protect this channel as well as helping business identify new ways to differentiate between authentic and suspicious behavior.

We’ve also got some exciting research going on into new attack vectors and so we expect to be making some announcements around our discoveries and solutions in the coming months. We believe that is important for businesses to invest in intelligence as well as products and so we can promise that Kaspersky Fraud Prevention solutions will continue to evolve as the threat landscape does.