Several high-profile companies fell victim to devastating cyberattacks in May. Both the Co-op and Marks & Spencer admitted that customer data was stolen by hackers, as well as an attempt to access data held by Harrods.
At this year’s Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam, The Independent asked Johan Gerber, executive vice president and head of security solutions at Mastercard, to share his top tips and insights on how people can protect their finances from criminals amid an increasing number of cyber hacks.
Think of the basics
One of the main pieces of advice offered by Mr Gerber several times is something customers will likely have heard before.
“We ask people to be diligent, to stop and to pause,” he says. “Just think – it’s the age-old thing. The basics cover 70 to 80 per cent of the problems.
“If you stop and pause and ask yourself the question: why is this coming my way? Why is somebody picking me to make this offer that's so unbelievable, that's out there?
“For certain scams, I think that's incredibly important.”
Embrace checks around transactions
While Mr Gerber underscores the importance of consumers taking a moment to stop and think when it comes to sending money and managing their finances, he agrees that our fast-paced world has made that principle harder to accomplish.
“With the whole expectation that everything has to be instantaneous - criminals prey on that,” he says. “That need for speed. But people want to do things [fast] and once I’m emotionally involved or attached to something and I can execute it right now, I want to do it and get through it.”
Mr Gerber knows banks can’t “rely on the consumer 100 per cent” to stop and think, “because fraud will happen”. He explains that extra confirmation steps, or “friction”, when transferring money helps to put a check on transactions.
Consumers should embrace that, he says, as a method of being certain the company behind the transaction has your back - and be aware of those who try to push through big money transactions quickly.
‘Every family should have a safe word’
In January, the telecoms regulator Ofcom announced a new requirement on phone providers to tackle “number spoofing” – where fraudsters imitate UK phone numbers from trusted individuals and organisations such as a family member, bank or government agency.
With certain exceptions, phone companies now have to block all international calls which misleadingly show a UK landline number to the consumer – also known as the “presentation number”.
He suggests families should come up with a safe word to verify one another’s identity for when situations arise involving money. Scams such as texts impersonating a relative or even AI-generated voice calls have recently been reported.
Mr Gerber says: “There are a lot of scams where family members are being extorted. Have that safe word. Very, very important - and it's actually so easy to do. Every family should have a safe word that you could just say, ‘What is the word?’”
What about the businesses themselves?
Of course, businesses themselves must be the first line of defence for their customers, putting systems in place to protect their data as well as protecting themselves against cyber threats.
Mr Gerber’s interview with The Independent comes just a few hours before his session on “the evolving cyber threat landscape”, discussing both cybercrime and new technologies.
He is clear which one poses the biggest danger in the future.
“For me, the threat of cyber is by far the largest threat,” he says. “And the problem is cyber is spilling over into traditional cyber that what we know - people hacking into systems. But when people hack into systems … they steal those card numbers, then they go and do fraud. When they do that fraud, that fraud produces money.
“So one of the things that we have strived to do is to bring all the financial institutions together to say, ‘How do we share data that we're allowed to share with the regulatory constraints that we have?’
“Businesses should invest in cyber, they should invest in technology, they should invest in collaborating with other businesses as well - those are some of the things that I would highlight strongly.”
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