Black Friday brings the picture of chaos to mind when people go berserk in stores, right? And true, not long ago the standard protection gear was helmets, knee – and elbow pads in the brawl for Black Friday brings the picture of chaos to mind when people go berserk in stores, right? And true, not long ago, the standard protection gear was helmets, knee – and elbow pads in the brawl for Black Friday door-cracked deals. But this is rapidly changing as more and more people (naturally) avoid the in-store ruckus and instead hunt for Black Friday deals online from their homes.
People’s desire to grab top Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals for their friend’s and family’s Christmas lists is a massive threat to both retailers and consumers. During the online shopping frenzy, people click-search for a bargain after a bargain and tend to ignore elementary security procedure
If it walks like a duck or clucks like a duck – it’s probably a duck.
As online retailers’ email campaigns ramp up with irresistible offers, cybercriminals are getting ready to get in on the action into action too. The holiday season provides a golden opportunity for fraudsters to dispatch millions of phishing emails with too-good-to-be-true discounts that land in our inboxes mingled with legitimate offers.
The smartphone security dilemma
It’s not just online frauds that present a threat – all digital or electronic means of payment, like card transactions and ATM withdrawals, are equally vulnerable to fraud, this we already know. But – there is one significant device that has become the most exposed and undefended in recent years – the smartphone. This fact is particularly disheartening as the smartphone is also the preferred means of payment and shopping for an ever-increasing amount of people. One security pitfall is, for example, that mobile browsers have short address fields and it can be hard to see the full URL because of this, which makes it more challenging to see the deceptive link.
The regulation that comes to the rescue – PSD2
The EU regulation PSD2 (Second Secure Payment Directive) is about opening up banks’ APIs to third parties. Still, the directive also requires that transactions from €30 and up go through heavy authentication before an approved purchase. To handle this, the customer experience can, in many cases, take a blow, as it means more clicks and complex setup of various authentication applications on people’s own devices and more advanced security procedures to go through than before.
How about Covr?
With this in mind, we developed the Covr app, which circumvents user-friendliness and security paradoxes. As a result, Covr is both ultra-secure and convenient for people to use – and the shopping holidays can become a fun, safe, and happy experience again for your customers.
