Breaking silos: The convergence of cybersecurity and fraud prevention

In many enterprises, cybersecurity and fraud protection are operated as separate teams. Cybersecurity is generally focused on the protection of information systems, whereas fraud prevention is focused on managing illicit activities exploiting business processes. These two areas obviously have overlap, and the processes by which these two different groups operate have become increasingly overlapped as well. Both cybersecurity and fraud protection focus on real-time threat detection through observation of anomalous behavior and comparison of activity with past observations of threat activity in order to anticipate future threats. Since a significant aspect of most fraud activity now involves exploitation of flaws or vulnerabilities that fall under the umbrella of cybersecurity, it is now more important than ever that these two different fields are combined into a single group.

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A merged approach to cybersecurity and fraud prevention has created the cyber-fraud kill chain, a combined set of methodologies and TTPs used by both cyber threat actors and fraudsters. Joint cybersecurity/fraud teams are using this kill chain framework as the basis for improving their operations, through such methods as combining technologies, sharing monitoring operations, multichannel surveillance, and shared indicators of compromise. The goal is to use such means to cut down mean time to response, since in both situations, early detection is the most important step to mitigating cybersecurity or fraud threats.