BioCatch

Short Summary

Fraud imposes major and growing costs on businesses, with cybercrime damages projected to reach $10.5 trillion by 2025. While banking, finance, payments, and retail remain prime targets, fraud is increasingly shifting toward industries such as insurance, gaming, telecommunications, healthcare, cryptocurrency exchanges, travel/hospitality, and real estate, partly because banks have improved defenses and fraudsters pursue easier “targets of opportunity.” Prominent fraud categories include Account Takeover (ATO), often driven by breached credentials, credential stuffing, malware (man-in-the-middle/browser), and Remote Access Trojans (RATs); Account Opening (AO), where stolen PII is assembled into synthetic identities to create fraudulent accounts; and social engineering voice scams (Authorized Push Payment fraud), in which victims are persuaded to initiate transfers under false pretenses.

Risk-based multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a core mitigation approach, but it can be undermined when victims are manipulated into authorizing transactions or when malware corrupts signals used in risk evaluation. For stronger transaction-time decisions, risk-based MFA works best when integrated with Fraud Reduction Intelligence Platforms (FRIPs), which enrich authentication and transaction systems with real-time context and scoring. FRIPs commonly deliver identity proofing, credential intelligence, device intelligence, behavioral analytics, behavioral/passive biometrics, and bot detection.

BioCatch is a FRIP provider founded in Tel Aviv in 2011, delivering cloud-hosted APIs that capture session telemetry via JavaScript and mobile SDKs to analyze behavioral biometrics (e.g., keystrokes, mouse movement, touch pressure, swipes, scrolling, and gyroscopic movement). It baselines historical behavior to detect anomalies, infer RAT/emulator usage, and apply cognitive analysis indicators (hesitation, duress, distraction, familiarity) to distinguish legitimate users from fraudsters and identify social engineering in progress. The platform includes policy authoring and promotion controls, case management workflows, and analyst dashboards, and reportedly processes over one billion transactions monthly while protecting more than 150 million consumers with regionally localized data in Azure.

Interesting Facts

• Cybercrime costs are estimated to reach $10.5 trillion by 2025.
• Account Takeover fraud commonly involves breached passwords and credential stuffing.
• Malware techniques cited for ATO include man-in-the-middle and man-in-the-browser attacks.
• Social engineering voice scams are also known as Authorized Push Payment fraud.
• FRIP solutions generally provide identity proofing, credential intelligence, device intelligence, user behavioral analysis, behavioral/passive biometrics, and bot detection/management.
• BioCatch was founded in Tel Aviv in 2011.
• BioCatch captures signals using JavaScript and mobile SDKs for Android and iOS.
• BioCatch risk scores are delivered on a 0–1,000 scale.
• BioCatch reports handling more than one billion transactions per month and protecting more than 150 million consumers.
• BioCatch is hosted on Microsoft Azure with customer data localized regionally in AU, EU, and NA.

Notable Quotes

• “Fraud perpetrators also continually diversify their Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs).”
• “One of the chief mitigation strategies against these types of fraud is risk-based multi-factor authentication (MFA).”
• “Thus, it is important to be able to have deeper insights into the context of each transaction.”
• “FRIP solutions operate optimally when integrated with or informed by Fraud Reduction Intelligence Platforms (FRIPs).”
• “Passive, or behavioral, biometrics measure how a user interacts with their keyboard, mouse, and mobile device.”
• “Historical behavior is baselined for each user for runtime risk evaluations.”
• “BioCatch takes these attributes and applies behavioral psychology research for a more innovative and accurate analysis of risk.”
• “Thus, hesitation and duress are quantifiable, and these data points can be used to raise the transaction risk level.”
• “BioCatch has implemented a layered approach to ML detection methods: unsupervised algorithms for detecting outliers and supervised algorithms for classifying outliers and determining if they are indicators of malicious activity.”
• “Utilizing fraud reduction intelligence platforms is an absolute “must” rather than a “nice-to-have”.”