Account takeover protection: How do you stop ATO attacks?
If your company interacts with its customers digitally — a very safe bet in today’s business landscape — you should be aware of the risk of account takeover (ATO) attacks. This is a growing category of threat based on seizing control of customers’ login information for a variety of nefarious purposes.
Threat actors who practice account takeover methods can take advantage of a company through unauthorized access to thousands of profiles. Add also the fact that people often reuse the same username and passwords across multiple sites, the scale of the threat becomes clear when you see the number of data breaches that occur. Fraudsters can try the credentials that are stolen from the data breach and in just 2024, 3,158 compromises occurred, only 44 fewer than the record set in 2023.1
Dealing with account takeover fraud demands a concerted effort on your part, driven by both strategies and technology. What your brand needs is a reliable way to verify the identities of your customers, all without negatively impacting the customer experience. Building such a system is a challenge, but it’s one worth accepting.
What do you need to know about account takeover attacks?
ATO rates are on the rise. In 2021, 22% of people said they’d experienced an ATO event.2 In 2023, the rate was 29%.3 Extrapolated to the full adult population, that’s 77 million more accounts compromised in the U.S. alone.4
In a full summary of 2023 trends, the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) named existing account takeovers as the most reported kind of identity misuse, coming in at 52% of victims.5 The prospect of extracting value from unprotected customer accounts remains a tempting lure for cybercriminals.
Attackers engaging in account takeover fraud are selecting targets of opportunity. Consumer accounts may not have the same level of defense as corporate resources, making them likely targets.
Customers’ online profiles can also have weak passwords. Seven out of 10 compromised account holders said they had used non-unique passwords.6 This shows a major vulnerability:
- Attackers who break into accounts based on stolen password data from one company can then compromise those same users’ accounts with other companies.
- Threat actors who take over a single account with a method like credential stuffing may highjack more of the owners’ profiles.
Data breaches affecting thousands, or even millions, of victims at once have become a fact of life. Only 19% of consumers did not receive a data breach notification from at least one company this year, down from 44% last year.7
Quick-profit motives lead to account takeovers
Taking control of customer accounts can benefit fraudsters in several ways, depending on your company’s industry and offerings.
Issues with identity are often especially acute in industries that commonly offer bonuses to individual users’ accounts. This includes any sector where valuable sign-up bonuses may motivate attackers to compromise hundreds or thousands of accounts, or to create new, fraudulent accounts with stolen credentials. Some prime targets for today’s threat actors include:
- Ecommerce retailers: Customer accounts on retail sites are valuable targets because they may contain saved payment card information, gift card balances and loyalty points that attackers could redeem for cash value or sell at a profit.
- iGaming and sports betting providers: Since sign-up bonuses and one-time promotions are frequent customer attraction tactics in the gaming and betting spaces, these companies are at risk of account takeovers or, perhaps more prominently, fraudulent new account creation.
- Airlines, hospitality and other service businesses: Loyalty points have a near-cash value in spaces such as airlines and the hotel sector.
- Financial institutions: Attackers using stolen personal information to open new accounts or apply for lines of credit from banks mean these organizations must always be on guard against new fraud tactics.
In any case, the motive is roughly the same: to use anything of value associated with an account, such as reward points or gift card balances, or to make purchases with saved payment information.
Account takeovers: One of several kinds of account compromise
When considering the scope of ATO fraud and the need to implement account protection solutions for your customers, it’s important to remember that threat actors can compromise accounts in several ways.
While an ATO is currently the most common type of identity misuse suffered by consumers, new account creation is right behind, accounting for 36% of victims.8 Once a consumer’s account has suffered a takeover, ongoing consequences can include more complete identity theft and the takeover of other accounts.9 Between these leading types of attacks, it’s clear that there is value in using solutions that establish verifiable identities for your account holders, new and existing alike.
Implementing account takeover attack protection
Comprehensive account protection and verification solutions are a natural need in an era of frequent data breaches and ATO attack incidents. They must meet two separate objectives simultaneously, and at first glance, these priorities clash with each other:
- Airtight identity management and verification: Businesses need to know that they are dealing with legitimate accounts from account creation onward, and to verify that the people logging into these accounts are their rightful holders. This may mean using multiple detection strategies every time a person logs in and monitoring behavior on an ongoing basis.
- A convenient experience for customers: While locking down their systems against ATO threats and other kinds of identity attacks, businesses can’t make the customer experience too onerous or inconvenient. While more advanced identity verification features can make it harder for credential thieves to log into stolen accounts, they can also make interacting with the company hard for legitimate users, nullifying some of the advantages.
Fortunately, the latest generation of technological solutions has applied new techniques to identity management, allowing your organization to take a programmatic look at every login attempt and each interaction with a minimum of friction for your team and for the customers themselves.
The key technological developments in the battle for more effective identity management have involved the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. The latest generation of algorithms analyze vast amounts of customer behavioral data, highlighting risk factors for compromised accounts without forcing those users to go through frequent manual verification processes.
Identity Verification in the Background
One way to prevent account takeover fraud and related forms of identity compromise is to implement multiple security tools targeting various aspects of the company’s ecosystem. The ability to constantly check user information against established baselines is the quality that sets advanced solutions apart. Identity security platforms consistently monitor:
- Customer device type.
- Connection type.
- User location.
- Existing account reputation.
- User behavior analytics.
When these details don’t add up, and it appears the account may be compromised, then the user faces identity verification checks or receives restrictions. In the absence of such danger signals, the person can keep browsing for a positive and uninterrupted experience.
A focus on real-time behavioral analysis takes the pressure off credentials as the be-all, end-all of user account protection. This is a vital consideration in an era of widespread data breaches and steadily rising ATO rates.
Find an account takeover solution that suits your business
At Accertify, we’ve built an Account Protection product that deeply integrates machine learning (ML) to verify users are who they say they are, both when they create new accounts and at every touchpoint thereafter. The solution is built to detect risky areas of your process where ATO attacks may be occurring so you can take targeted action and shut those dangers down.
The system’s unobtrusive operations don’t impede users’ login processes, ensuring a positive experience and a frictionless customer journey. Amid this positive environment, users can rest assured their accounts are subject to an extra level of protection.
In addition to using behavioral analysis to determine which accounts are victims of ATO attacks, the Accertify platform can sense when users are creating synthetic or bot accounts or running multiple accounts from a single point. Defending your users’ accounts against unauthorized access and protecting the integrity of your sign-up bonuses, rewards points and other programs should be a high priority today. Fortunately, technology exists to reach this goal.
Learn more about Accertify’s Account Protection solution or request a demo.
[1] ITRC, 2025
[5] ITRC, 2024
[7] ITRC, 2024
[8] ITRC, 2024