Airome Technologies and Group-IB Partner to Fight Digital Banking Fraud

Airome Technologies, which builds security products for digital banking and electronic document management, has formed a strategic partnership with Group-IB. Their joint offering brings anti-fraud systems, scoring and electronic signatures together inside remote banking services (RBS).

Group-IB is a Singapore-based company focused on preventing cyber attacks. It is among the global leaders in threat hunting and intelligence, anti-fraud products and high-profile cyber investigations.

Why Singapore's payments shift raises the fraud risk

Traditional financial services and fintech in Singapore are going through major change, and the two companies pitch the product as a way for banks and financial institutions to get ahead of cyber fraud. Singapore already has a mature payments ecosystem built on traditional methods, but mobile payments keep growing, and the government has actively encouraged them. NETS, the country's payments services provider, for instance, has installed electronic payment terminals at hawker centres and coffee shops so that customers can pay in several ways. Payment services in Singapore also operate under a carefully tuned regulatory framework.

More digital payments bring a built-in risk of attack, from data breaches and fraud to credential stuffing, in which stolen username and password pairs are fed automatically into login pages to break into accounts. The government has again moved first here. In August 2019, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced compulsory rules for every financial services and e-payment company, covering strong passwords, firewalls against unauthorised network access and multi-factor authentication.

Denis Kalemberg, CEO of Airome Technologies, said identity theft and unauthorised access to bank accounts are a major worry in Southeast Asia. Many companies, he added, still appear not to understand the full consequences of data breaches and leaks used for credential stuffing, and these problems make social engineering attacks easy. According to Kalemberg, Airome built PayConfirm to give the highest level of security for any operation across digital banking channels without making the service less mobile or harder to use. Integrating it with Group-IB's Secure Bank, he said, delivers both, and the resulting adaptive authentication cuts a broad set of risks across all kinds of operations while making life simpler for bank customers. He called the partnership timely and relevant for Singapore and for Southeast Asia more widely.

How Secure Bank and PayConfirm work together

Secure Bank draws on Group-IB's threat intelligence along with signature, behavioural and cross-channel analytics to spot threats that conventional transaction-based anti-fraud systems cannot see. It includes a complete stack of anti-fraud technologies that protect banks and their customers at every layer and pick up fraud while it is still being prepared. Working alongside other anti-fraud tools, it can block malicious bots in real time and detect attacker logins, social engineering, botnets, money laundering, compromised victims and infected end-user devices. It also covers the mobile channel, including smartphones, tablets and other iOS and Android devices.

The product's adaptive logic correlates how users behave on their devices as they deal with their bank through different channels, and how they behave across different banks, in order to stop cross-bank fraud. Machine learning, advanced device fingerprinting and user behaviour analytics let the system recognise unusual or suspicious actions by a criminal posing as a genuine customer.

Ilya Sachkov, CEO of Group-IB, said the company was pleased to work with Airome to improve cyber hygiene and proactive threat intelligence in the region. He explained that Secure Bank scores user devices in real time across web and mobile channels. If a transaction is started on a mobile device through a remote control application, for example, no digital signature will be issued for it, because those actions carry the hallmarks of a socio-technical attack. He described this as a simple and convenient way for banks to protect their customers.

Together, Secure Bank and PayConfirm give bank customers a secure and seamless way to transact through digital channels. To authorise a transaction, sign a document electronically or carry out any other operation, the user only has to enter a password, use Touch ID or Face ID, or apply an e-signature.