Account Takeover ATO

An account takeover is when a stranger gets into a customer's shop account and uses it as if it were their own. Nothing is broken to get in, because the thief walks through the front door with a password that already works. Most of those passwords were stolen somewhere else, on a site the customer signed up to years ago and forgot.

The prize is not always money in an obvious form. A saved card lets the thief order goods to a new address, and loyalty points are worth real cash that is easy to spend quickly. A gift card balance vanishes in minutes, and even the order history is worth something, because it tells a scammer exactly what to say when they phone the customer later.

The warning signs are small and easy to miss. One account suddenly logs in from two countries within an hour, or someone changes the email address and the delivery address a minute apart. A quiet account that bought nothing for a year places three orders in one evening, and failed login attempts climb across many accounts at once, always at night. None of that shouts, which is why shops usually notice after the refund request rather than before it.

Three defences stop most of it. Ask for a second step at login, a short code sent to the phone, so a stolen password on its own is useless. Limit how many tries anyone gets at a password, then slow that person down. Send an alert to the old email whenever the address, the phone number or the password changes, because that one costs almost nothing and catches the most. Linkysoft turns all three on by default in every shop it builds, and treats them as part of the cybersecurity work rather than an extra.

One thing surprises owners. The costly part is rarely the stolen order itself, but the hours of staff time spent arguing with a customer who is certain they never ordered a phone to another city. A shop that can show the login history, the device and the moment the address changed settles that call in two minutes. That history has to be kept from the first day, though, because nobody can add it backwards. Storek records it as standard, and when Linkysoft builds a shop as a custom web application the same record is the first thing we switch on.