CLOUD: SECURITY
Collective action is needed to fight the growth of cybercrime. Sarah Armstrong-Smith of Microsoft and Marc Trepanier of ACI Worldwide discuss how to frustrate the fraudsters and maximise the benefits of the Cloud Cybercrime is the dark side of the explosion in e-commerce and digital financial services. As payments have moved online and become increasingly mobile and diverse, fraudsters have been quick to follow the technology curve and adapt their methods to new opportunities. Digital acceleration during COVID-19 presented a fresh opportunity, and has provided rich pickings for the unscrupulous. In particular, there has been a spike in authorised push payment (APP) scams, as criminals used fake websites and emails to trick consumers into misdirecting payments. According to UK Finance, which represents hundreds of organisations and describes itself as the collective voice of the banking and finance industry, fraud increased by 70 per cent in the first six months of 2021.
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ThePaytechMagazine | Issue 10
In response, regulators and policymakers are calling for greater cooperation from the banking and fintech communities, and the UK Joint Fraud Taskforce was recently relaunched to combat the worrying rise in fraud during the pandemic. Against this backdrop, big tech companies such as Microsoft must take the lead to counteract fraud by ensuring they embed security in their technologies and work collaboratively with the financial community to increase protection. As chief security advisor at Microsoft, Sarah Armstrong-Smith is focussing on the challenges of Cloud adoption and digital transformation, and how to contain the cyberthreat. “Cybercrime is constantly evolving,” says Armstrong-Smith. “Just think of what’s happened over the last 12 months with the number of digital devices in use, the number of banking apps, the accessibility of online services, and the volume of digital transactions. All that has played into the hands of cybercriminals. “At Microsoft, we look at ways to provide services for different sectors, and how to address the challenge of transformation and security. “One of the most important things is to get insights and analytics, to really find out what’s going on, and to scrutinise transactions and look for patterns.”
The scale of the challenge means that organisations must work together, says Marc Trepanier, who is a principal fraud consultant with real-time payments specialist ACI Worldwide. Trepanier has more than 22 years’ experience working in fraud and financial crime, a timespan that mirrors the rise of the internet and concurrent growth in cybercrime. “The fraudsters, banks and payment service providers play cat-and-mouse,” says Trepanier. “We’re forever trying to stamp out fraud in one area and then it pops up somewhere else. “In terms of measures to prevent fraud, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) have made big strides, and federated ML, a collaborative approach to fraud prevention, is poised to be the next great leap for payments.” With traditional ML techniques, datasets are harvested from different devices, such as mobile phones and laptops, and then uploaded to a centralised server. Federated learning is a ML model that doesn’t require large amounts of shared data, which poses risks for privacy and security. Federated ML promotes collaboration and partnership between enterprises, with data shared in a ‘closed-loop system’ so that there is no actual data exchange. “Organisations can only keep growing so much horizontally, gathering ever-more data,” adds Trepanier.
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