Crime

Aug 29, 2016

Creating PayPal’s Perfect Storm

Apparently, I am a miscreant. I am the one guy who managed to break PayPal. What? OK, here’s the story. The next 2,000 words tell the story but, if you’d rather miss that and cut to the chase, jump to the end. Most of my customers wire me the money. American customers are more of…

Jan 15, 2016

Analogue criminals in a digital world

I was tempted to blog about Bitcoin 3.0 this morning, but Marcus Swanepoel has already done that – news of Bitcoin’s death has been overstated – so I thought I’d blog about robbery instead. Daylight robbery is far more exciting than investing in the future after all, and there has been a big case over here…

Jan 12, 2016

URGENT: Open this attachment or your account will be suspended

I wake up today with the usual massive dump of emails, two of which looked a bit suspect. The first is from DHL, saying my shipment is cancelled. I don’t use DHL and expect no shipment from them, so delete it. The second is an email from Transport for London with a PDF attachment. It’s…

Nov 26, 2015

ToR and the Darknet: how to be anonymous

Building upon this theme of anonymity it’s worth talking for a minute about the Darknet. It sounds like something out of Star Wars, but is all about ToR and the ability to surf without leaving a digital footprint. This is the world of Silk Road, as detailed in the recent case study from Wired, and gives an…

Nov 5, 2015

The end of a ‘bank account’ as the digital me takes over

I had a really interesting conversation with Chris Barker, Head of Digital and Engineering for Royal Bank of Scotland. As usual, the conversation moved around data analytics, deep learning, artificial intelligence, building enterprise data systems, separating content from processing, re-platforming the back-end infrastructure and core systems and more. I’ll write more about that stuff tomorrow,…

Oct 9, 2015

What happens if your Digital Identity is compromised?

I’ve been asked the same question twice this week in two separate conferences (one in Vienna, the other in San Francisco): “how will we deal with the corruptive forces when we are all on the net?” The second questioner clarified what she meant by referencing the film Enemy of the State, where Will Smith gets…

Aug 26, 2015

What can banks learn from the Ashley Madison affair?

So we’ve all seen the headlines about Ashley Madison, the adulterer's website as it’s nicknamed. Here’s a taste of what the site’s attitude is like (this is a real advert, not a spoof): It was the central focus of the film Men, Women & Children, which came out late last year. If you haven’t seen…

Jun 1, 2015

FIDO needs more vision for digital identities

The real way to crack the onboarding and criminal activity is to create strong and secure digital identities. We are moving in that direction, but it’s a long slow process. For ages now, I’ve written about getting rid of passwords and improving authentication using mobile technologies: Why is KYC so difficult? AML prevention lies in…

Apr 2, 2015

The billion dollar fraud and how deep learning might avoid it

Banks are being hacked all the time. According to various statistics, banks get over a million cyberattacks a year, and protecting the bank from breach is getting harder and harder. This was well illustrated by the Kapersky report of a cybercrime group in February gaining access to over $1 billion in two years by targeting over…

Oct 8, 2014

Simplification? No, let’s double the complexity (from four pillars to eight)

Some of you may remember that I had a fraud alert involving Braintree a month ago. The alert was raised by my credit card provider, after they detected a suspicious transaction for $699 via Braintree. Luckily, as I’m a little bit in the know, I knew that Braintree is part of PayPal but, even so…