proactive defense system

Billions of dollars are swindled yearly by malicious hackers gaining unauthorized access to target victims’ financial accounts. It’s an unfortunate truth, but there are things you can do to secure your assets and protect yourself from this malicious onslaught. Account takeover attacks are a serious threat to individuals and organizations alike. They occur when a cybercriminal gains access to an individual or organization’s online accounts and uses them to steal sensitive information or financial assets. In order to protect themselves against these types of attacks, building a proactive defense system is essential.

So, what can you do to protect yourself and your business against account takeover systems? Try not to depend on any security system but rather build up your own defenses based on your highest-risk scenarios and slowly add additional layers of protection.

A proactive defense system is designed to identify and prevent attacks before they occur. This can include implementing multi-factor authentication, monitoring account activity for suspicious behavior, and regularly changing passwords. Additionally, it also emphasizes educating employees and users on how to identify and prevent account takeover attacks. In this blog we will dig deep and learn how to build a defense system.

How to build a proactive defense system against account takeover attacks?

In this section, we’ll dive into the world of cyber security and explore how to protect ourselves from the malicious intent of cyber criminals. From mastering the art of strong passwords to implementing two-factor authentication, we’ll arm you with the tools and techniques to keep your online presence secure. Let’s start.

1. Web application firewall (WAF)

Web application firewalls (WAF) are a critical element of your proactive defense system. WAF is a security tool that prevents web attacks. It monitors the web traffic between a client and server and blocks unauthorized requests.

WAFs help protect web applications from common attacks, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). WAFs are also used to protect against DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks and botnet activity. As reported by Ciso, the WAF market is expected to reach $5.48 billion by the end of 2022.

You can also use a WAF to block certain kinds of traffic – like requests for specific files or programs – and even block users based on where they’re located geographically (based on their IP address).

2. Bot management solution

Bot management is a way to automate the removal of malicious bots from your website, social media accounts, and other online properties. It’s a proactive system that can protect your brand and keep your online presence safe.

It’s also an effective way to control the number of bots crawling through your content, so you can ensure that you’re not getting penalized by search engines or social media platforms for having too many bots on your site.

3. Rate limiting

Rate limiting protects your account from takeover attacks by limiting the number of requests that can be made to your API in a given time frame. This can be done through a fixed rate limit or a sliding window that resets periodically.

The most common rate limit strategy is to block all requests after the first N requests in the period, where N is the number of requests allowed per second specified by the rate limit.

To protect against account takeover attacks, it’s important to ensure that this number is high enough so that it will take an attacker too long to brute force their way through enough requests to get into your account.

4. Monitoring

Monitoring is the most important part of proactive defense systems. The layer gives you a heads-up about when and why your account has been compromised. It’s the only way to know if an account takeover attack has happened and what kind of damage it has done.

Monitoring includes:

  • Monitoring of suspicious login activity.
  • Monitoring for suspicious access to sensitive data.
  • Monitoring for unauthorized access to sensitive data.

5. Make use of “defense in depth” security

A “defense in depth” approach to security is the best way to keep your accounts safe.

It’s a system that relies on multiple layers of defense instead of just one. The idea is that if a hacker gets through one layer of security, they’ll still have to get through another, and then another… and so on. This means that even if one layer fails, other layers will keep your account protected.

For example, if you have a firewall, it’s important to add another layer, like antivirus software, on top of that. This way, if someone manages to get past the firewall and then tries to infect your system with malware, they will be caught by your antivirus software.

6. Add multi-factor authentication

If you want to protect your account from takeovers, you must ensure that you have enabled multi-factor authentication. In fact, MFA can block 99.9% of breach attempts.

Multi-factor authentication verifies a person’s identity using a combination of two or more different methods. One factor could be something you know, like a password or PIN. Another factor could be something you have, like a phone or fob. And yet another factor could be something you are, such as your fingerprint or face (you can also use retina scans).

This means that even if your password is stolen by someone else, they will still need access to another form of verification to access your account.

7. Use a password manager

The first line of defense against account takeover attacks is to use a strong password. But even the strongest password can be easily guessed or cracked by hackers.

A password manager is a program that helps users store passwords securely.

Password managers generate passwords for websites, apps, and other online services, then store them in an encrypted database (called a vault). When you need to log into one of your accounts, the password manager automatically enters your credentials.

Password managers are also great because they can help you create strong passwords that are difficult for hackers to guess (or crack).

Conclusion

Account takeover fraud is a growing problem and requires a new approach to detecting and protecting against it. Given the opportunity, hackers will always find weak spots to exploit.

The key is to create proactive defense systems that anticipate where their attacks might fall. With this in mind, perhaps we should be less interested in blaming our fraud detection tools and more interested in taking measures that keep accounts from being taken over in the first place.

Don’t let your passwords get hacked. AuthSafe can help you to secure your accounts with the right tools and tech. Connect with us today.