Online wellness and Financial Safety lead to Financial Wellness
Consumers are living their lives online. Criminals know this, view consumers as the weak link, and increasingly drive “people-focused” cyberattacks. As a result, online and financial safety are now clearly a key component of Financial Health.
Unfortunately, consumers' online behavior often aids and abets hackers - creating risk for themselves and their FIs that turns into billions of dollars lost annually to fraud. They re-use passwords across accounts, don't use multi-factor authentication or transaction alerts on their financial accounts, fall for phishing attacks and online scams, and more.
It's no wonder that hackers send billions of phishing emails every day. That credential stuffing attacks are now reported to drive 5% of all traffic on the Internet. That online scams exploded in 2020, costing US consumers nearly $50 billion.
In today's world, “online wellness” truly drives consumers' financial wellness.
As we noted in our blog post, The Identity Theft Opportunity, FIs are in great position to help their customers achieve online wellness. Consumers don't trust their own ability to be safe on the Internet, and they do trust their FI to help them. But what should FIs help them do?
What is Online Wellness?
The saying goes that if you ask 100 security experts what the most important thing to do to protect yourself online, you'll get 100 answers. Security experts are compromised online at a rate 56% lower than others, so Covered went off to research online behavior of security experts and non-experts to try to get a clearer answer.
Covered evaluated over 200 online behaviors, and with the help of machine learning, identified 18 behaviors which security experts generally exhibited and others didn't - which led to this lower rate of online compromise. These 18 behaviors can be summarized in 4 Meta behaviors:
Skepticism. Security professionals' confirmation bias is the negative - they look for evidence that they should not trust, rather than looking for reasons to trust. The opposite of how non-security experts approach situations.
Thinking ahead. Hackers try to compromise people indirectly as well as directly, via multi-step attacks such as stealing passwords from one site and using them to break into an account on another (because people re-use passwords). Security experts understand this and act accordingly.
Being vigilant. Security experts know that we can't be 100% secure, things will happen. So they set up alerts to be notified when actions occur, to know if someone might have hacked an account.
Focus on the most important things. Believe it or not, just like consumers, security experts want things to be as convenient as possible. But, they know that they should take action to have stronger security on the things that are most important to them - their savings, their credit and credit card, their tax info, etc. And it’s on these accounts that they set up the strongest security.