Digital transactions in Europe have experienced a 30 per cent rise in the volume of cyber attacks in the first quarter of 2018.

This is according to a new report published by ThreatMetrix, which discovered 80 million fraud attacks on European digital businesses and 210 million bot attacks originating from Europe in the first quarter of 2018. This is based on analysis of 1.9 billion digital transactions on the ThreatMetrix Digital Identity Network in Europe.

The report noted a shift in cyber criminal behaviour from short, isolated peaks of fraud attacks to more sustained, high-volume attacks across a number of days or weeks. As a result of this, European digital businesses must invest in innovative, real-time security capabilities that are robust enough to withstand intense periods of attack.

Identity spoofing is a growing trend in the region, according to the report, resulting from the vast swathes of stolen personal data now available on the dark web. In Germany, identity spoofing attacks has more than doubled year-on-year.

The European e-commerce market is the industry being hit hardest with regards to the volume of attacks. Some 60 million online transactions were rejected as fraudulent in Q1, representing a 47 per cent increase over the past year.

“As European digital businesses face intense onslaughts of identity abuse and fraud attacks, they need to prioritise investments in new technologies that give insight into true identity of their users in a way that is invisible to the consumer,” said Alisdair Faulkner, chief products officer at ThreatMetrix.

Mobile now accounts for 58 per cent of all transactions in Europe while in the UK that number rises to 67 per cent, significantly higher than the global average of 51 per cent. Key mobile growth regions included France and Central and Eastern Europe, where mobile transactions grew 96 per cent and 63 per cent respectively.

While the volume of attacks on mobile are rising, the report found that mobile transactions are attacked half as much of much proportionally, when compared with desktop transactions. “The mobile channels offers a wealth of opportunities to effectively identify consumers in a way that is persistent and reliable,” added Faulkner.

“Mobile users have zero tolerance for being slowed down by clunky security steps, but the future of this channel relies on the continued ability of digital businesses to offer consumers peace of mind that their identity and financial information is secure,” he concluded.

Andy McDonald, vice president for merchant payments at ACI Worldwide, said the figures must serve as a wake-up call for e-commerce retailers across all sectors.

“Fraudsters are adapting to this new environment and are exploiting the loopholes, so the priority for retailers therefore must be to invest in real-time fraud monitoring and prevention solutions,” he commented. “With the right data, tools, profiling processes and closely tailored fraud strategies, fraud prevention can and should go hand in hand with growth.”

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