According to the 2015 Fraud Mitigation Study commissioned by the LexisNexis Fraud Defense Network, “cyber criminals do not choose one industry over another when it comes to committing fraud. In fact, all industries are targets.”
The study looked at a wide range of cross-industry fraud trends “and surveyed 400 fraud mitigation professionals from the insurance, financial services, retail, government, healthcare and communications industries.” 84 percent of respondents noted that the cyber fraud cases they investigated in their own industry were also connected to another industry. Furthermore, 77 percent of those surveyed said that “cross-industry fraud cases had a moderate to extreme financial impact on their organization.”
So, what can be done to better combat cyber fraud? Cooperation.
John Lorimer, vice president of analytics product management for the risk solutions business of LexisNexis, argued that cyber criminals rely on the fact that industries don’t communicate with each other. Once they have sapped everything out of one industry, they move on to the next unsuspecting victim.
That is why Lorimer wants individual industries to share data on fraud cases among other industries. “Through cross-sector collaboration, industry would have the upper hand. In this scenario, the fraudsters would be at a disadvantage,” said Lorimer.
This idea is corroborated by the LexisNexis study, which found that 74 percent of respondents “acknowledged it would be valuable to have information on fraud cases from outside their industry.”