Today, technology is associated with every sector of the economy. The finance sector is no different. From financial transactions to customer experience, technology has taken up a big chunk in the financial services sector. It is necessary for companies, especially in the finance sector, to invest in new technologies for fraud prevention in banking.

vTech Solution, Inc. helps you to avail top industry tech to identify and protect your organization from a potential threat. Want to know more?

When COVID-19 wrecked down the world economy, new opportunities surfaced for many businesses. It also applies to hackers. The dollar amount of attempted fraudulent transactions rose 35% in April 2020 — in the midst of the global pandemic — according to the Fidelity National Information Services Inc., a banking fraud detection company.

Shift to online platforms has been speeding up the digitalization of business and commerce worldwide. People who were earlier skeptical about e-commerce and preferred to stay away from it are now feeling safer to conduct digital transactions. It has caused a lot of inexperienced users to be a victim of fraud. It is becoming difficult for companies to deal with the increasing rate of digital fraud in banking.

Therefore, companies in the financial payments services sector should invest in AI as their ultimate weapon.

Read more about the benefits of AI.

The question arises as to why AI is perfect for fighting digital frauds in banking. AI provides the scale and speed needed to take on challenges such as reducing false positives, preventing fraud attempts, and reducing manual reviews of potential payment fraud events.

Here are some of the reasons why AI is perfect for fighting technology frauds in banks: -

1. Payments fraud-based attacks and AI:- 
   The payments fraud-based attacks are complex and change their unique structure, pattern, or sequence, which makes them undetectable. Well, this is not the case today! AI and machine learning make it easy to detect fraud accurately. The model can be trained to detect more than one fraud within more than one type of transaction or application. As the technology frauds in banks increases and evolve, AI is needed to confront these challenges.
   
2. AI brings scale and speed to the fight against fraud:- AI provides digital businesses with the advantage in battling the various risks and forms of fraud. AI also helps in payment fraud detection along with bank fraud prevention and detection. Due to the higher efficiency and speed of information processing, machine learning (a subset of AI) algorithms can find sophisticated fraud traits that humans cannot detect.
   
3. AI’s various predictive analytics and machine learning techniques: - These techniques are perfect for finding anomalies among large-scale data sets in seconds.  A cool feature of machine learning is that the more data it has to train on, the more accurate its predictive value. It is especially true in the case of payments fraud detection, where AI learns what legitimate and fraudulent transactions look like from a contextual intelligence perspective.

In conclusion, the selection of the right technology for bank fraud detection and prevention is “the first step.” AI is still scratching the surface when it comes to the financial services sector. AI incorporates several algorithms, such as supervised learning, unsupervised learning, knowledge graphic, etc. These different algorithms help in differentiating multiple fraud detection.

to learn how vTech Solution, Inc., supports you with your tech-related worries in 2021.

Also, check out 5 benefits of Fraud Detection and Prevention Solutions for your Finance Organization.

Ransomware attacks surge 40% globally in Q3 (Source)

What do you imagine when you hear the word “ransom”?

Probably, a threat-note from a criminal, like you see in the movies, right?

However, ransomware attacks are sometimes not what they seem. They are in the disguise of legitimate files, making headway to your personal computer or mobile device.

Ransomware and cyber attacks are recently making headlines with massive attacks that genuinely impacted several organizations and government agencies across the country. Around 18,000 organizations were having malicious codes in their networks, and 50 of them suffered major breaches. (source)

At vTech, we provide end-to-end solutions for all your technology needs. Our experience for more than a decade has enabled us to develop best practices and workflow procedures that are designed to relieve you from all your IT worries and focus on your business.

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What are the five important facts about ransomware?

1. Your systems can be easily infected, but not detected.

Hackers are experts in manipulating the detection programs of the organizations. They can easily infect and control targets by using by sending small payloads with little to no command.

Let’s make it simpler.

Victims either receive an email or a malicious link, which is sent to create a backdoor on their systems through susceptible software.

Cybercriminals easily target businesses or organizations with a ransom demand in exchange for the user being able to recover their data. And once the ransom is paid, you are on their hotlist. They know you’ll pay again, and the risk of them being identified is significantly lower as compared to crimes like credit card theft.

Cryptocurrencies make ransomware untraceable. Even the tech experts have fallen into the trap of ransomware attacks.

2. Question for you: Has your anti-virus software solution got you covered?

For hackers, it is just a piece of cake to evade detection from even the most advanced and know anti-virus solutions. Basically, ransomware targets stored files in your document folders.

So, even if you have an anti-virus solution, there are chances that the ransomware might sneak past the software. As the solution looks for known signatures and blocks them, but what about the ones that are in disguise?

Even your anti-virus has updates to detect the ransomware, there are fewer chances of recovering the files. However, anti-virus solutions are efficient in preventing known attacks, so they are a must for your agency’s overall security plan.

3. Backup your files as a last resort.

Now when organizations take backups of their files, they tend to not take it seriously and feel it is an add-on task, thereby, taking shortcuts, but only storing important files or not testing whether the backup files are working. Worse, backups are taken on network drives by some organizations, which can be easily encrypted by ransomware.

In absence of a proper backup strategy, the recovery process becomes tedious with multiple data types, files, and endpoints to recover. Then the companies feel it’s easier to pay the ransom and get data for immediate file recovery.

4. Adopt a well-rounded protection approach

Use multilayer protection before your data gets infected. You can prevent ransomware at various stages of infection with different protection mechanisms located at different places of your system. You can prevent known attacks with the help of anti-bots, anti-virus, anti-spam, and anti-phishing solutions.

Have protection on the endpoint. If you miss an attack on the network, you can prevent it while it reaches the object of the attack. This is the best way to prevent cyberattacks at all levels. Fill in the gaps of your security system by adding a protection layer on every defense.

While it’s a great approach, anti-ransomware comes to the rescue for unknown threats.

5. Yes, there are anti-ransomware solutions!

Any anti-ransomware solution should have the following characteristics:

• Ability to detect suspicious behavior
• Prevent attacks
• Recovery approach

Some other features that an anti-ransomware solution must have are impact modes. For example, it may be great to secure your system but cause your PC to run slowly. Now, every anti-ransomware tool might not give 100% results, as they too will protect against particular types of ransomware attacks.

However, a great anti-ransomware tool will protect your system against all types of ransomware attacks. It should monitor the encryption process and remediate the encryption based on a local copy.

Google is having one of the major outages in recent times.

Google services got disrupted, impacting thousands of users, and the majority of users are reporting that they are unable to login into their Google account.

Gmail for mailing, YouTube for watching videos, Google Drive for saving data, Google photos to save photos,

Google meets to attend meetings,

Google search to do everything above and beyond.

It’s pretty much scary.

Google outage: A confusion between the configuration of Google servers led to a massive outage; affecting not only G Suite but also other tech giants that use Google Cloud Services.

Google service abruptly went down. It seems the latest outage, is more intensive than the last one.

The unexpected outage reminds us of how dependent we are on the services provided by the internet giants. Without Gmail, Calendar, and Drive, we probably lost track of the work progress, got the meeting time wrong, and unable to access the important cloud files before a key presentation.

Here’s why vCloud solutions come into the picture:

To know more, Let’s Talk!

You cannot decline the fact that 2020 was a reset button for the whole world. As the work from home trend gained momentum, cloud computing took the forefront of technology. Cloud adoption is not something that is "new" for most industries. However, there are a few sectors where this might not be the case. Insurance is still in the early days of implementing cloud migration strategy and cloud-based solutions.

The reason that the insurers are still at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cloud computing is security. It is one of their most significant reasons for caution and rightly so when it comes to the sensitive data, they hold with them of their customers.

In a report by Accenture, it stated that;

But recent threats and cybercrimes have provoked the insurance sectors to opt for a more secure and trustworthy platform to safeguard their sensitive data. And what could be better than the cloud? The insurance companies are now becoming more inclined towards cloud-based solutions when it comes to storing their data.

Besides providing security and flexibility, cloud-based solutions also offer rapid provisioning and robust data governance facilities. That is one of the reasons insurance CISOs are now trying to implement cloud migration strategies.

"vTech Solution, Inc., has established itself as one of the best cloud solutions providers to our clients. Our robust solutions will provide a secure and manageable environment for your organization's sensitive data."

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Here are a few of the advantages of cloud adoption in the Insurance sector:

1. Cost-Effective:

Business expenses is something that worries the majority of insurers. But cloud computing is here to save the day! It helps the insurance agencies to control their costs seamlessly. Moreover, cloud adoption provides flexibility and security that improves business processes.

Insurance companies can reduce the cost of buying hardware and software as on-demand, and pay-as-you-go options are available. They can eliminate the need to purchase local servers and data centers that take up physical space and even consume electricity all time.

2. Faster Deployment:

Unlike traditional IT services, cloud computing does not take much time for deployment. With abundant resources available to allow multiple users in a shared environment, these resources are always scalable.

3. Business Growth Opportunities: 

Customized cloud solutions for the insurance sector can help businesses to grow more efficiently and, in a customer-oriented approach. Cloud-based insurance services offer the users a more secure and timely output that lets them understand customers' needs better. And this, in return, helps the users to provide better services, which will eventually lead to business growth. Isn't that awesome!

4. Scalability:

The insurance sector is quite a steady industry. However, the industry tends to change at any given moment. Insurance business can see spikes which originate from higher demand for resources. But the insurance agencies can mitigate those spikes with cloud adoption. Cloud-based solutions help the insurance sector to reduce costs and increase efficiency in their functioning.

5. Risk Management:

Risk mitigation is possible through cloud computing. Through cloud-based solutions, the insurance businesses can integrate risk data, risk assessment reports, and various risk indicators in their framework that helps them to protect their data against data thefts and breaches.

6. Increased Productivity:

Cloud computing offers real-time data so that the insurers can improve their overall productivity and efficiency. Cloud computing has many benefits, and simplified access is one of them. It offers users a holistic view to better understand the customers' needs.

Cloud computing has a lot of benefits in the insurance sector, but what are some of the best practices that the insurers need to adopt or implement at the time of cloud migration.

• The first thing is to understand the requirements, scope, and life-cycle of the application.
• Establish a framework that helps in defining organization to those who will make related decisions.
• It is necessary to review first and then choose an IT partner that can meet SLAs. So, decide wisely!
• Monitor and keep track of actions to address both short and long-term needs and opportunities.
• Support cloud computing through various initiatives as well as activities that will strengthen the success of cloud computing, like a cloud training program to develop cloud skills within the employees.

How can we help in cloud migration?

When it comes to cloud computing, vTech Solution, Inc. believes in taking away the pain of IT infrastructure management for you so that you can focus on your business.

We customize our solutions to meet your needs. Every requirement by our clients is unique and, we intend to deliver our very best. Need to know more? Let's talk!

In conclusion, it is easy to say that cloud computing has become an imperative aspect of the global environment, especially for businesses dealing with customer data like insurance, finance, etc. But as we move forward from the pandemic slowly and gradually, these sectors will understand the importance of cloud computing. Since an increase in cloud-based attacks has already pushed many insurance organizations to shift to the cloud, many will follow a similar suit.