Urgent: Threat Protection Needed Now
Proactive threat detection is the key to business success in the new decade.
When it comes to threat protection, there is no such thing as “better late than never.” You either beat the fraudsters to the punch, or you’re left managing the damage.
Early Detection and the Healthcare Sector
We know and accept this truth in other arenas — healthcare, for example. As recently reported by The ASCO Post, “In 2018, there were more than 18 million new cases of cancer diagnosed, of which nearly 5 million cases of breast, cervical, colorectal, and oral cancers could have been detected sooner and treated more effectively.” As a more specific example, “In the United States, the 5-year survival rate for women diagnosed with cervical cancer at an advanced stage is 15%, compared to 93% if diagnosed when the cancer has not spread.” Early detection strategies have become a mainstay of modern cancer management, and the results have been overwhelmingly positive.
The Critical Connection Between Early Detection and Business Growth
We see the impact of early detection for our clients every day. DataVisor recently worked to address a significant array of fraud challenges for a client that has more than 100 million monthly active users, and which offers services in 20+ countries. Operating at that kind of scale means vulnerabilities are an inevitability, and in the case of the client, aggressive growth strategies were exacerbating the problem. In every new region they expanded into, new attacks awaited, including variations of promotion abuse and buyer-seller collusion.
Early detection changed everything. By leveraging the power of unsupervised machine learning to capture bot-registered malicious accounts early at the registration stage, the client achieved a 300% detection lift that resulted in more than $6M in annual savings.
Proactivity and the Insurance Sector
In addition to healthcare, insurance is a sector that is starting to see the benefits of proactivity, and technology is making a significant impact in that regard. A recent article from SmartInsure titled “How IoT Will Transform Insurance from Reactive to Proactive” states that “convergence of IoT technology with insurance is advantageous for both insurers and homeowners by changing their communication from unfortunate occurrences to proactive home management.” Anurag Chauhan, Global Head of Insurance, NIIT Technologies, in an interview with IIR (Insurance Innovation Reporter), echoes these sentiments about technology’s ability to enable proactivity, noting that “the big difference is in changing the core of the customer experience from a reactive service associated with natural disasters and mistakes, to proactive partnership associated with trust and safety.”
The Critical Connection Between Early Detection and Customer Experience
Proactive detection strategies recently made an enormous difference for another DataVisor client — a leading global social commerce platform with over 250 million monthly active users. For a social platform, trust is everything, and pervasive toxic content directly subverts user trust, and rapidly accelerates customer churn rates. The client in this case was enduring relentless large-scale spam attacks resulting from widespread account takeover (ATO). Because the spam traffic originated with ATO attacks, early detection was the only viable way to address the problem. Using machine learning models to analyze user histories, behavior changes, and suspicious patterns, DataVisor’s solutions were able to capture sophisticated, large-scale, coordinated ATO attacks, and prevent spambot attacks, before downstream damage could occur.
The result was a 7x increase in overall detection rates, with 80% of spammers stopped at sign-up, and 99% of all spammers captured.
Proactive Risk Management in the New Decade
As businesses look ahead to 2020, embracing proactivity should be front-and-center when it comes to risk management. What does this mean in actual practice? DataVisor Co-Founder and CEO Yinglian Xie, writing recently for VMBlog, offered her predictions for how businesses will make the transition from reactive to proactive in the new decade:
Real-Time Holistic Analysis
Drawing on the power of unsupervised machine learning, businesses will be able to holistically analyze massive volumes of data in real time, without the time-wasting hindrance of historical labels and the ongoing need to retune outdated models.
Accuracy and Speed
Advanced feature engineering capabilities will enable businesses to achieve higher degrees of monitoring and detection accuracy even as they reduce false positives and improve operational efficiency.
Centralized Intelligence
Organizations will evolve from outmoded lake and repository thinking to embracing the centralization of intelligence as they advance their abilities to derive genuinely actionable intelligence from vast troves of unlabeled data.
The modern digital economy is a minefield riddled with risk, and there is an urgent need for solutions that can proactively defuse attacks early, before damage occurs. The dividing line between those who succeed in the new decade and those who don’t, runs between those who embrace proactivity, and those who remain reactive.
