The threat of cybercrime is one that organisations must be wary of all year round; however, targeted attacks could increase during the holiday period.

This is due to increased online user activity, such as shopping, switching devices, and more.

Cybercrime can cause devastating financial implications but also impact the trustworthiness of a brand; therefore, Syniverse is helping organisations to create secure identity management experiences for customers.

Dan Wolanski, Director of Product Management at Syniverse, has told UC Today why secure messaging is needed more during the holiday season than any other time of year.

He said: “The biggest thing is that around this time of year, people are doing things that are outside of their norm.

“They’re generating transactions that are exposing them to experiences that wouldn’t be typical, they’re going out shopping, they are requesting permissions on new devices, they are looking for deals etc., so they’re exposed to more things.

“The barriers and their normal, natural defences are weakened, so it’s putting them in situations where they have to make choices based on this.

“Bad actors can exploit those abnormalities by putting the targets in situations where they can make bad decisions by smishing or clicking on some phishy links.

“The sheer volume of things that are taking place at this time of year makes it easy for targeted attack-type stuff to slide in under their natural radar as they’re getting so much cover fire from all the other things coming in.”

The Syniverse Identity Management Services Team

Syniverse can provide real-time detection to customers, which allows them to highlight high-risk phone number events such as a SIM change, porting or call interception.

Their features monitor and validate the entire path of a message transaction, all the way from sending out the message when it reaches the intended recipient.

Syniverse ‘account take-over’ looks to see if the SIM has been compromised, for example, swapped into another device or any synthetic identity fraud.

The company also has ‘right party verification’, allows organizations to confidently determine if the phone number they are sending to belongs to the intended recipient.

It does this by using the network data to validate the personal information matches the data associated with the phone number registration.

This is linked Syniverse’s identity verification, which aims to prevent account takeovers and stop fraud before it starts.

Syniverse’s security services allow for continuous integration, which validates and authenticates customer records against licenced sources in real-time.

The solution uses licenced sources to flag or block any suspicious activity to ensure that the organisation knows if the person they’re sending the message to is the intended recipient.

Syniverse doesn’t only provide secure messaging from the organisation to the end-user but also works to build trust the other way around.

The company has designed features, so users know they are dealing with a specific organisation and not a bad actor.

Syniverse allows companies to use branded URLs for web links they send out to customers to make them easily identifiable and linked to a specific, trustworthy organisation.

The company also ensures that shortcodes or 10DLC numbers can remain the same so users can go back through their history and identify the same number.

These consistent SMS numbers help to build a trusting relationship between the organisation and the end-user.

Customers can also call the 10DLC numbers back to reach the organisation that had initially tried to contact them for extra piece of mind.

Ramifications of Cybercrime

Syniverse states that cybercrime can have high costs to an organisation’s annual bottom line.

The company claims that $6T can be lost from businesses that fall victim to cybercrime through data breaches and leaks.

However, it isn’t just legal ramifications that organisations suffer from when it comes to cybercrime; data breaches have a severe impact on the trustworthiness of customers.

Wolanski added: “Data breaches and leaks make front-page news, especially when the organisations involved are big tier-one institutions.

“This can erode customer faith in those organisations, especially financial institutions or major electronics companies.

“Identity and information are only secure as its weakest link. Everybody is trying their best not to be that weakest link.

“If you do become the weakest link or an incident happens through your access to it, then it puts a real big negative perception on that organisation.

“There are legal ramifications where you have a monetary value that you might be taking in fines or something like that, but the real impact is more the impact on the brand.”

Syniverse Hyperscale Communications Platform

Syniverse’s Hyperscale Communications Platform (HCP) is the company’s cloud-native, unlimited-capacity CPaaS platform.

The HCP allows users to reach their employees and customers through their preferred messaging channels, such as WhatsApp, SMS, MMS, and more.

Syniverse has developed the HCP to ensure its secure messaging features are built-in as standard and is a cornerstone of the company’s CPaaS offering.

Wolanski commented: “In many cases, security is the armour that goes around the things, but the HCP platform is built rock hard to start with.

“We don’t have to build things on top; it’s impenetrable on itself.”

With security functions being native to the solution, Syniverse’s HCP will be able to provide secure messaging needs for any customer that deploys it.

The Syniverse Hyperscale Communications Platform is currently in development and will be available for use in 2023.

If you wish to find out more about Syniverse’s secure messaging, then click here to visit the company’s website.

 

 



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