Akamai Account Protector’s New Protection Against Account Opening Abuse
Akamai’s account abuse protection solution, Akamai Account Protector, has expanded its market-leading capabilities to include the detection of account opening abuse, also known as new account fraud.
What is account opening abuse?
Account opening abuse involves the creation of fake user accounts on digital platforms like commerce, gaming, social media, and banking sites. These attacks are stepping stones to a range of harmful actions and fraud.
Although the fraud schemes vary, financial and personal gain are the common denominators among attacker motivations. Fraudulent new accounts are often used for promotional abuse; for example, fake new accounts can be created to take advantage of coupons or free trials for new users. New account fraud can also be used as one part of a multistep fraud, such as money muling assets from an account takeover.
The figure presents a nonexhaustive breakdown by six industries (gaming, social media, digital commerce, media and streaming, financial services, and auction sites) of the most common attack schemes that employ fake accounts.
The many ways that account opening abuse can lead to other fraud outcomes
Account opening abuse: A complex problem to solve
Account opening abuse is a particularly complex problem to solve. For example, without specific detections for fraudulent new accounts, many organizations struggle to know whether an account was created using stolen personal information such as Social Security numbers, or if those accounts were created using emails that were created solely for the purpose of using those addresses to launch an account opening abuse attack.
Account Protector’s specialized detections
Account Protector uses behavior anomaly detection to find abnormalities in traffic patterns during a given time window — for example, it can detect an excessive number of new accounts created from a single IP address, device, network, or session that has been active for only a few seconds.
Account Protector also brings two other powerful features to work alongside behavior anomaly detection and other existing account abuse detections. Account Protector can detect and mitigate fraudulent accounts using:
Email intelligence, which analyzes the syntax of an email address and the abnormal use of an email to detect malicious patterns
Email domain intelligence, which evaluates the activity pattern coming from individual email domains, including disposable domains and excessive use of a domain
Defending businesses that transact online
The addition of this account opening abuse detection capability further enhances Account Protector’s leadership in the market.
Organizations that do business online, particularly those doing financial transactions, benefit from being able to trust users. The ability to detect fraudulent account creation stops a significant attack vector from being used, enhances trust, and provides extra security and better experiences to legitimate users who want to create and manage accounts with them.
Learn more
To learn more about account opening abuse and how Akamai can help you defend against it, read the first, second, and third blog posts in our series on the topic.
If you’d like to speak with someone about account opening abuse, call your Akamai account representative or talk to an expert now.
