Understanding the strengths of proactive ATO prevention

Increased vigilance against account compromises and disastrous leaks have lead many company to shift to more proactive approaches to minimizing account takeovers (ATOs). By leveraging advanced intrusion detection and response schemes to actively engage potential threats, companies can minimize the loss of profit, reputation, customer trust, and employee morale associated with account takeovers.

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits:

Damage mitigation

Breaches happen, despite all best efforts, but breaches should not necessarily lead to significant damages for your company; access to data should be as limited as possible, and should never lead to a full account takeover with proactive measures.

By utilizing a data breach API to stay informed on the true state of your security, you become equipped with the tools necessary to mitigate most significant threats to your business’s data security. Rarely does a major breach occur without prior minor breaches; instead, it’s the companies which ignore or miss the early warning signs which later experience significant threats, whether those threats be a single overt attack or a steady trickle of compromised individual accounts.

Perception

Proactive ATO prevention doesn’t just reduce the actual threat of breaches, it reduces the perceived threat as well—a factor which can be as important, or more, to your company’s long-term health. By actively identifying threats to customer accoutns and communicating those threats to clients or customers, you present your company as attentive to risks and actively pursuing security for your clients.

Customer may not like finding out they’re exposed, especially if it’s due to a breach of your security, but you’ll never face the level of critical backlash you would by hiding from the threat and hoping for the best.

Liability reduction

Taking active measure to prevent significant breaches could also be of importance for matters of liability. Even if you aren’t necessarily exposed or likely to experience account takeovers which put you at risk of civil action, the measures you take can be used to negotiate reduced insurance premiums or to alleviate the concerns of clients, business partners, shareholders, or executives.

Education

Proactive prevention of account takeovers involves communication with the clients, employees, or other individuals whose data may be exposed due to breaches or other circumstances. Over time, you can leverage this process to ‘train’ your clients, employees, business partners, etc., so that they take fewer risks and expose themselves less.

An educated populace is a less exposed target for breaches and takeovers, which means this isn’t just a public service—it’s something you’re strongly incentivized to work on.

For example, the simplest of data security education points: Let’s say you maintain data on customer passwords and email addresses for account logins. If those customers don’t reuse their passwords, because you alert them to breaches consistently and they’ve learned to appreciate how exposed they are, then you don’t have to worry that a breach of a completely unrelated business with which you share customers may turn into account takeovers at your company.

Discouragement

Generally speaking, malicious actors attack your data because they expect to profit from the endeavor. By consistently preventing minor breaches from turning into ATOs, you eliminate the profit motive for attacking your business. Some parties may still continue to target you for the simple value of the data they might obtain, but so long as those breaches cannot be turned into an ATO—and thus a potential payday—you’ll see much less malicious activity over time.

There is no such thing as perfect prevention in data security. However, active measures can minimize your losses in every area, from customer trust or employee morale to direct financial losses due to compromised accounts or civil liability issues.

Adopt active ATO prevention measures. Collect data on attempts to compromise your security, successful or otherwise, and act on that data early. You only stand to gain from these measures.