How to know whether your business is at risk

Contemplating whether your business requires an upgrade in security measures or if your existing protocols are satisfactory? To start, assess your industry as certain types of businesses that are more susceptible to fraud or malicious attacks than others.

Here’s a closer look at which types of companies need to be on guard:

Any company that manages money on behalf of its users are usually top targets for fraud. These organizations could be banks, cryptocurrency platforms, credit card companies, retailers, and more — any business where someone could take over an account and use it for nefarious purposes (whether stealing the user’s payment information or using their account as a money mule).

Organizations entrusted with sensitive health and legal information, such as HIPAA-protected data, tax records, and legal documents, must ensure the utmost protection of this confidential and personal data. Given the highly sensitive nature of such information, robust security measures are imperative to safeguard against unauthorized access, data breaches, and potential legal liabilities.

Defense, law enforcement, and government agencies store a wealth of sensitive and personal information, making them a prime target for attacks. Plus, most of these industries have regulations in place requiring them to use 2FA or MFA, so you’ll need to ensure your authentication practices are compliant.

If your business’ risk profile is minimal, investing in additional fortified security solutions may not be necessary. If you already have an effective user authentication flow in place and you haven't experienced significant instances of fraud, you can confidently focus on building and expanding your business without the need for additional security concerns.

Your business might be at risk: What’s next?

If knowledge-based authentication is not going to cut it for your company, you have options to protect your business. Here’s a closer look at how Twilio’s authentication solutions can help you keep your user’s information secure:

Verify

Twilio Verify is a multi-channel user verification solution that can authenticate and verify users over SMS with RCS upgrade, WhatsApp, voice, silent network authentication, email, passkeys, push notifications, time-based one-time passwords, and more. Handling more than 4.8 billion verifications each year, Verify can add seamless 2FA to your onboarding and login experiences, as well as confirm the possession of phone numbers and email addresses to prevent fake account creation/account takeovers and protect high-value transactions.

Financial technology platform Intuit used Twilio Verify to expand SMS as a channel for one-time passcodes to over 200 countries in just three months. The company also achieved 94% deliverability across the globe and sent over 1 million SMS messages per day. With Twilio, Intuit confidently provides its customers with a secure and efficient authentication experience, ensuring they have seamless access to financial services whenever they need them.

Interested in getting started with Twilio Verify? Talk to an expert or jump into the code and look at the Verify API documentation.

Verify Fraud Guard

Verify Fraud Guard uses automatic SMS fraud detection to block suspicious messages from being sent by your Verify Service. It analyzes current and past SMS traffic to identify any unusual patterns in SMS destination traffic or SMS pumping fraud and automatically blocks the prefix of the destination of the suspected fraud. You can select the level of protection you want — ranging from basic, standard, to max protection — so you can strike a balance against maximizing user conversion with minimum friction or protect yourself in high risk countries.

Twilio Verify Fraud Guard is backed by 100% guaranteed protection from SMS Pumping Fraud. - terms and conditions apply.

Twilio Verify Fraud Guard has saved customers $55.8 million in explicit savings by blocking over 569 million fraud attempts since June '22 up to July '24.

Lookup

Twilio Lookup allows businesses to use real-time phone data to get information about and determine the validity and ownership of phone numbers. It can help your business identify whether a line is a mobile, landline, VoIP, or temporary number, so you can stop fraudulent SIM swaps, catch fake accounts, and build secure relationships with legitimate customers at scale.

By using Lookup to identify phone types and carriers, your business can: