Amisha Parikh on AI, cyber defense, friction and the need to protect small business.
It’s never felt harder to keep your money and your identity safe. Every day, it seems as though there are new ways that you can get hacked, compromised, or scammed.
October is Cybersecurity Awareness month but 2024 might be the year that digital fraud took on a dangerous new year-round urgency, in Canada and around the world.
BetaKit’s CEO Siri Agrell spoke to Mastercard’s Amisha Parikh, Vice President of Security Solutions, North America, about being on the front line of global cybersecurity and how business owners can help protect themselves.
It’s Halloween and I can’t think of a scarier topic. What are you seeing out there?
It is scary. There is a constant risk of data being leaked, stolen, resold on deep and dark web. We’re seeing these persistent threats around scams. The top threats include investment scams, romance scams, job seeker scams. We’re seeing new types of scams being enabled by AI technology like deep fakes and voice cloning. The adversaries are sophisticated criminals who are embracing technology to execute new types of scams.
So this isn’t just trolls or individual scammers, this is an industry, a sector?
Cybercrime, if it was an economy, would track as the third largest economy in the world, only behind the US and China. That’s in terms of the size of losses and the value of the fraudulent theft. It’s forecasted to reach over $10-trillion by 2025 according to Cybersecurity Ventures. It is huge.
Many BetaKit readers are founders and CEOs. How does cybersecurity impact businesses specifically?
It’s not if it happens, it’s when it happens.
We did a survey recently that found that only 16 percent of small businesses owners in Canada felt they knew what to do in the event of a cyberattack. We’re not just talking about scams, we’re talking about data leaks, system compromises – this is where small businesses can be a target.
What do you recommend business owners do?
Keeping it top of mind is important because a lot of small businesses wouldn’t be able to sustain a cybersecurity attack.
When you start to look at the supply chain, you see that we’re all interconnected. Small businesses are connected into bigger businesses, for banking and database management, and those supply chains create risk. Ensuring every business is thinking about the security, including who you’re sharing data with as well as how and where money gets transferred.
Cybersecurity has to be integrated into how you run a business now, just like having to balance your books. Security should be a common thread that’s woven through how a business operates every day.
Easier said than done.
It can feel overwhelming. I encourage small businesses to use tools that are available to them to build awareness and focus on risk mitigation strategies. The Mastercard Trust Centre includes resources to assist businesses with cybersecurity education and advice, including our complementary Cybersecurity Assessment Tool.
You have to make this part of the roadmap in your business because security is just as critical as every other aspect of what you do.
How does Mastercard incorporate new technology into its own approach?
Mastercard is deeply committed to building a better cybersecurity environment. We’re continuously investing in the technology that is required to evolve and stay on top of what’s happening out there. Our approach is to take technology and combine it with insights to assess how we protect the ecosystem.
The use of AI as a tool has increased fraud detection by two or three-fold. We’ve deflected more than $20B in fraud attacks across our network in one year.
To combat fraud, Mastercard have to be detectives, technologists, psychologists. What sort of skills do you look for on your team?
We’re not necessarily a team of fraud practitioners. We have people who are savvy at looking at data, because from data we can draw insights. Data is at the core of what we do so that’s an important skill set. We have people who think about trends and the changing landscape, and help us consider product roadmaps. We think about how to use AI effectively and ethically. There are so many incredible use cases for AI and gen AI, including combatting fraud risk. Cyber criminals are harnessing the same technology, and they don’t have the guardrails we do. They aren’t worried about ethics or regulations. They’re only focused on moving quickly.
It must feel a bit like whack-a-mole?
Sophisticated cybercriminals are always going to be trying new things. And fighting fraud feels like a never ending arms race. But we do have the technology that allows us to stay one step ahead.
We need to focus on embracing technology, looking at patterns of behaviour, investing in technology like AI and biometrics, which takes the idea of the password and moves it to the person themselves. Things that are uniquely on your person and using them for authentication.
We are figuring out at what point in the journey a little bit of friction is going to be accepted because it’s safeguarding individuals, their families and their businesses.
Do you feel like the good guys are winning?
There are a lot of invested partners at the table. Yes, the bad actors are out there but the way for us to win this fight is for us to come together. I truly believe that collaboration is top of mind and industry is coming together. The fight against fraud and cybercrime isn’t one we can go at alone. We are all in this together.
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Take advantage of Mastercard’s support and resources, including a free Cybersecurity Assessment Tool, designed to help protect your business today and tomorrow.
All images provided by Mastercard.