Biometrics prioritised as firms look to prevent mobile fraud

A new survey of 250 US firms has found that an average company loses $92.3 million a year to mobile fraud, with the majority now planning to implement biometrics as a security measure in response to the issue.In terms of authentication, 47 percent of respondents said they were planning to require biometrics in the future, followed by phone-based authentication at 38 percent and soft tokens at 32 percent in the study conducted by RSA, the security division of EMC, in conjunction with TeleSign, the Mobile Identity company.”Most respondents said that they are looking to add more authentication measures,” said Angel Grant, senior manager of fraud risk and intelligence at RSA, to CSO online. “Most realize that a user name and password isn't enough anymore.”The average revenues of the companies involved in the survey was $2.5 billion, meaning that the mobile losses accounted for more than 3 percent of revenues.”An uptick in online fraud resulting from today's environment of large-scale data breaches and security incidents is something TeleSign is seeing first-hand,” said Steve Jillings, CEO of TeleSign. “Illicit activities including spamming, phishing attempts, affiliate fraud and e-commerce fraud all have a common primary motivation: money.”Key findings from the research included:Average revenue loss due to mobile fraud is $92.3M per year (among 250 organizations with average revenue of $2.54 billion), found the study.Mobile growth trend: More than 50 percent of respondents believe that mobile revenues will grow 11-50 percent over the next three years, and 30 percent believe it will grow 51-100 percent.Rising fraud trend: The growth of mobile interactions is expected to increase the percentage of mobile incidents significantly, with 19 percent of companies already indicating that 25-49 percent of their fraud incidents are due to mobile. These rates are expected to grow, and in some cases at least double over the next 2-3 years as mobile revenue contributions increase, unless significant remedial actions are implemented quickly.Current lack of adequate security: One in four businesses currently don't require login identification for mobile users.Addressing the problem: In the next 2-3 years, next generation authentication technologies like biometrics, soft tokens and other two factor authentication will largely replace the user name and password as the primary method of authentication.

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