Introduction
Cybercriminals are always looking for ways to break into your private accounts and steal your personal information. Sometimes, getting access to your account isn’t enough; hackers want to control profiles like your social media or your work account. Once they’re in the driver’s seat, they can disseminate phishing scams to your followers and friends list, see confidential data available only to administrators, and even post on private groups where you have access.
This tactic is called account takeover, also known as ATO. This can lead to data theft, financial issues and communication problems in your interpersonal relationships.
Keeping your online accounts safe from hackers means taking measures to protect them against ATO!
How Does Account Takeover Happen?
ATO can employ artificial intelligence to help take over your profiles…and you can use AI to keep it safe from hackers, too. AI can spam a laundry list of accounts with brute-force password breakers and gain access to any profile with weak credentials; it can also be used to constantly monitor your accounts for unusual activity.
The program watches for things like unusual login attempts, unauthorized changes to your account settings, and strange messages being sent or received. If anything seems suspicious, the AI will alert you and your IT team so investigations can launch ASAP.
What is classified suspicious behavior?
- suspicious logins
- weird changes
- messages sent or received that strike you as odd
- anything impossible or strange
If your gut senses something, it’s better to follow your intuition than risk account takeover because you dismissed a red flag as “no big deal.”
Protect Yourself Against ATO
Thankfully, you don’t have to wait around for a hacker to act up on your network. Taking proactive defense measures can prevent cybercriminals from ever breaking in!
Just like important buildings have different access levels, your internal systems also need to have strong access controls and network segmentation. In other words, sensitive data is sectioned off so only authorized users can see or manage that information. The fewer people who know or can rightfully oversee private data, the fewer access points for cybercriminals to target.
Network segmentation ensures that different important data is stored and organized accordingly, so a breach of one restricted area (physically or digitally) does not constitute a leak on your entire organizational database.
Then there are remedial measures to minimize the damage of an incident if one should successfully occur. Set documented incident response plans to ensure that you, and all of your coworkers, know what to do when they notice suspicious activity. Do you know how to contact your superiors and IT team about a potential breach? Do your personal systems alert you immediately when something happens?
It’s never too late to shore up your defenses, and make sure that your systems are protected against the latest threats moving forward. Account takeover attacks happen…but it doesn’t have to happen to you! Keep your profiles safer via multi-factor authentication like biometrics, noticing and reporting suspicious activity on the network, and helping keep the confidentiality of the secure data that’s on your accounts and under your care.
