Account takeover (ATO) occurs when criminals use stolen credentials to access a user’s accounts without permission.
Criminals frequently exploit their illicit access by making fraudulent purchases, stealing sensitive data, or moving laterally within a target organization. SpyCloud’s ATO prevention solutions can help you protect your employees and consumers from account takeover by alerting you to stolen passwords before criminals have a chance to use them.
With hundreds of online accounts to keep track of, it’s inevitable that people will reuse their favorite passwords. Unfortunately, when a data breach exposes those passwords to criminals, every account that shares the same login information becomes vulnerable to account takeover. Criminals systematically test stolen credentials across other sites in manual or automated account takeover attempts.
Without visibility into which passwords criminals have access to, it’s challenging for security teams to prevent account takeover for their users. SpyCloud helps busy security teams stay a step ahead of cybercriminals by checking user logins against the largest database of recovered breach assets in the world.
Immediately after a breach, attackers keep stolen credentials contained to a small group of associates while they monetize stolen data, often engaging in highly targeted, manual account takeover attempts against high-value accounts. Once the attackers finally allow the credentials to leak to a broader criminal audience, often 18 to 24 months after the initial breach, advanced crimeware makes it easy for unsophisticated threat actors to use the data to launch credential stuffing attacks at scale.
SpyCloud researchers get access to breach data early in the breach timeline, enabling you to stay ahead of both targeted and automated account takeover attempts. Early access to breach data through SpyCloud makes it possible for you to validate user identities and reset passwords long before the data becomes available to a broader criminal audience.
Consumer account takeover fraud can result in substantial losses for you and for your consumers. Outright costs for your enterprise can include reimbursing defrauded customers, resolving increased support inquiries, handling chargebacks, and investigating fraudulent transactions. Worse, consumer frustration can result in lasting damage to your reputation and brand.
SpyCloud can help fraud prevention teams stay ahead of consumer ATO fraud by detecting and resetting exposed consumer passwords early in the breach lifecycle, heading off account takeover attempts.
Corporate account takeover poses a substantial risk to enterprises. With access to one employee’s account, an attacker can easily move laterally within a corporate network or gain access to sensitive consumer data, intellectual property, competitive information, or funds.
SpyCloud can help you protect employee and board member accounts proactively by enabling you to reset exposed passwords as soon as possible after a breach occurs. When an employee’s credentials appear in a newly-ingested data breach, SpyCloud alerts you so you can validate their identity and reset their password, manually or automatically.
Now that we have SpyCloud, we can protect hundreds of millions of people and prevent them from choosing passwords that have already been exposed.
TECHNOLOGY
Paradoxically, some password policies can increase your users’ risk of ATO, such as password rotation policies that encourage users to recycle old passwords or simple, memorable variations. The latest password guidelines from the National Institute of Standards and Technology move away from policies that have been shown to foster bad habits and instead adopt risk mitigation strategies.
NIST Special Publication 800-63B calls for organizations to check user passwords for those that may be “commonly-used, expected, or compromised” to protect users from their own bad habits. With SpyCloud Active Directory Guardian, you can simplify alignment with NIST password standards by resetting weak and exposed passwords automatically.
Download the Whitepaper: Understanding NIST Password Guidelines
Our award-winning products enable you to proactively protect your users’ accounts and thwart online fraud.
Protect your users from account takeover fraud and unauthorized purchases.
Protect your organization from breaches and BEC due to password reuse.
This CSO whitepaper provides a guide to the best practices for evaluating how well each approach works, including a checklist of topics to discuss with each vendor being evaluated.
Account takeover can be highly-targeted, sophisticated, and manual, or it can be high-volume and automated. Learn how to protect your enterprise from both types of ATO.
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