September 20, 2016
To help financial institutions better spot attempted fraud, the SWIFT interbank messaging network plans to begin offering voluntary “daily validation reports” to customers in December.
The move is designed to provide an “out of band” view of an institution’s messages to help anti-fraud teams better spot unauthorized attempts to move money via SWIFT, the organization says in a statement.
“A key step in the modus operandi in recent wire fraud cases at customer firms involves the attackers concealing their fraudulent messaging activity on customers’ local systems,” says Stephen Gilderdale, who heads SWIFT’s customer security program, in a statement. “Daily validation reports will provide a reliable and independent source of information, providing such institutions with an activity lens to help them quickly detect fraud – whether perpetrated by external attackers or by malicious insiders.”