Curbing Contact Center Authentication Breaches

Traditional authentication methods are no longer cutting it at call centers.

By nature, criminals who choose to commit their crimes over the internet are on a mission to find new and creative ways to simultaneously defraud both consumers and companies. It doesn’t help that traditional contact center authentication methodologies are easily circumvented by social engineering, which enables fraudsters to prosper.

The average smartphone or laptop computer is biometrically protected via fingerprint identification. Consumer-facing websites can only take credit cards via PCI-compliant mechanisms, and many demand two-factor authentication to access consumer accounts. In data centers, companies spend tens of millions of dollars, are subject to rigorous regulatory oversight, and face massive liability issues if they don’t effectively guard access to banking, insurance, medical and numerous other sources of highly sensitive personally identifiable information (otherwise known as PII). Yet when users contact their credit union (or any of the other above-referenced organizations), all they need to supply is basic personal information – the same information that an experienced hacker can glean, often from public domain sources or simple social engineering, in minutes.