Topic starter
12/06/2026 9:54 pm
TL;DR: A 121% Q2 increase in cyberattacks over Q1 2023 and a warning that adversary-in-the-middle phishing, SMS toll fraud, and normalised cybercrime-as-a-service will intensify enterprise fraud and account takeover risk headline Arkose Labs’ 2024 threat forecast, according to Arkose Labs. The practical issue is not just more volume, but a more industrial attack model that outpaces awareness-only defences.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Arkose Labs: “Guardians of Tomorrow: Arkose Labs Shares the Top 3 Cyber Threats for 2024”.
By the numbers:
- The article cites a 121% increase in total cyberattacks in Q2 over Q1 2023.
- Arkose Labs says SMS toll fraud increased by 141% in Q3 2023.
- The article projects a 20-fold increase in the prevalence of cybercrime-as-a-service in 2024.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when adversary-in-the-middle phishing is used against login flows?
A: The trust model breaks because the user appears to authenticate to the real service, while the attacker sits between the user and the target in real time.
Q: Why does SMS toll fraud create IAM risk as well as financial risk?
A: SMS toll fraud turns an identity control channel into a monetisation channel.
Q: How should security teams reduce account takeover from bot-driven attacks?
A: Security teams should harden the most abuse-prone flows first: login, recovery, device enrolment, and payment-related actions.
Practitioner guidance
- Tighten phishing-resistant authentication Move high-risk user journeys toward phishing-resistant methods and bind sessions more tightly to the authenticated context so a proxy cannot replay trust downstream.
- Instrument verification-flow abuse Track SMS and one-time-code traffic by destination, route and velocity so fraud teams can spot pumping patterns before billing spikes or verification abuse spreads.
- Harden account recovery paths Review recovery, reset and step-up flows for proxyable steps that can be abused when an attacker controls the interaction path rather than the endpoint.
Bottom line: The article describes a move toward industrialised fraud, where phishing, SMS abuse and service-based criminal tooling reinforce one another.
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This topic was modified 3 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group
13/06/2026 12:19 am
Phishing is no longer just a message problem, it is a trust-path problem. When attackers proxy the login journey in real time, the control failure is not user gullibility alone but the assumption that the visible site is the trusted site. That assumption breaks as soon as the attacker can sit in the middle of the session. Practitioners should treat phishing-resistant assurance and session integrity as one control surface, not two separate teams.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What does the rise of cybercrime-as-a-service mean for identity programmes?
A: It means attackers can scale abuse without building the tooling themselves, so fraud and account takeover should be planned as repeatable industrial processes. Identity programmes need controls that reduce throughput across login, recovery and signup flows, because service-based attackers will test those paths continuously.
👉 Read our full editorial: 2024 threat forecasts show fraud farms and phishing scaling fast
This post was modified 3 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group