Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Bill Bruno, CEO of D4t4 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How do you resolve that dichotomy?

Bill Bruno: One, you or someone pretending to be you is logging in. Let’s use an example that just happened with one of our customers. They had a situation where there was a large scam attempt where several users were receiving messages that were pretending to be the bank.

If you’re used to it or have seen it before, you can identify it as spam. But there are a lot of people out there that don’t. You might not think anything of it. Let’s say you typically access your account and you’re like me. You’re in Chicago. If somebody pretending to be me has logged in from China, then that becomes a piece of evidence that you could say maybe that’s not me.

Maybe you drill in further. My devices are typically the Macbook or the iPhone that he has. The device that this person’s on is none of those. If you just look at one piece of evidence, you can make a really wrong choice and say that’s not me. Maybe I just flew to Germany for work. That would cause a negative experience.

It’s a collection of things that we can have. It’s things like how you type, the speed at which you type, and the way you move a mouse on the page. There’s a variety of things that can be captured about you all from a perspective of using it for good to try to catch the fraudster.

Sramana Mitra: Given your vantage point, how vulnerable are we? It’s a very unsafe internet today. How unsafe is it?

Bill Bruno: You could look at just the growth of fraud around the globe where most fraud types have grown exponentially. Billions of dollars are at stake, and billions of dollars have been lost to fraud over the last couple of years. If you look at it from that perspective, you could make the comment that it’s not very safe at all.

You’ve got the other piece to it which is we’re moving so fast. The number of devices that can be used and the number of devices that are connected to the internet on your account are also increasing exponentially. Not only is fraud happening more but the opportunity for a fraudster to intervene has exponentially increased as well.

From that standpoint, it’s diligence. There is a massive amount of education that could be done to help inform consumers what to watch out for in every age group. Different age groups receive different types of attacks.

We just published something a couple of days ago around fraud geared towards the elderly. When you think about things like how trustworthy they might be or how not digital-savvy they might be and not realize that something’s happening as a result. The person calling isn’t really from the bank or the email that you got is not from your car insurance.

It’s about diligence and education on the front end. In the second half, you’re starting to see banks being held accountable with discussions around whether or not banks should be reimbursing consumers who fall victim to fraud. When you start thinking about that type of regulation and the fact that it’s being talked about in the US government as well, it becomes a question of how you intervene more quickly.

As a brand, how do you create that evidence so you can better protect consumers because it’s not something that diligence on the consumer side is ultimately going to holistically solve for this?

The last point I’ll make is, if you read about a particular fraud online, chances are the fraudster has already moved on. They’re evolving quickly. It’s not a point-in-time solution. It really needs to have diligence on both brands and consumers.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Bill Bruno, CEO of D4t4
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