Page 62 - Security Today, May/June 2019

an attack: there may be cases in which one family member legitimate- ly accesses the account of another. But given that fraudulent calls will ultimately need to be reviewed via costly human listening by security personnel, voice biometrics can dramatically reduce the amount of audio that needs to be listened to, as well as eliminate the need for random spot-listening. The listening effort can be directed to focus on those calls whose risk of fraud has been estimated as high.
Such risk estimation need not rely on voice biometrics alone. Au- tomatic call transcription, followed by Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify commonly used words, phrases, and sub-dialogues, can be effectively combined with voice biometrics to provide a stron- ger, multi-faceted approach to the estimation of risk of first-time fraud in contact centers.
Needless to say, all of the above methods can help to spot not only first-time offenders but also repeat offenders, without modifi- cation. However, voice biometrics can provide even more protection against repeat offenders. Provided that a contact center is willing to curate a database of fraudsters’ voiceprints, or retains access to a third-party database, the voiceprint constructed and then compared for authentication can at the same time also be compared to each stored fraudster voiceprint. In this way, voice biometrics can simul- taneously answer the questions, “Does the current voice match the account-holder’s voice?” and “Does the current voice match a known fraudster’s voice?”—increasing the chances of deflecting an attack from a repeat offender.
Finally, voice biometrics also provides a potential customer ser- vice benefit for legitimate callers. While some contact centers may only choose to augment the authentication phase of their calls with active voiceprint authentication, others may choose to instead short-
en it and to rely on passive voiceprint authentication over the dura- tion of the entire call. Because passive authentication is transparent to the caller, this provides a faster and easier customer experience. This is important because legitimate callers are reportedly becoming increasingly frustrated by the additional information they are asked to provide for security purposes, such as answering multiple ques- tions and memorizing multiple passwords.
Multi-Level Security to Combat Multi-Channel Vulnerability
Forward-thinking organizations are using voice biometrics as part of a larger strategic security approach to gain greater protection. A best practice is to implement multiple levels of security to impede scam- mers. Device identification, knowledge-based authentication, cross channel behavior analysis and voice biometric recognition are part of an effective security practice, according to Gartner Research, an advisory firm. Implementing analytics across channels to identify red flags is necessary since fraudsters are exploiting any and all channels to penetrate customer accounts.
As the saying goes, the best defense is a good offense. Proactively integrating voice biometrics into a multi-layered security approach can go a long way to preventing security attacks
before they happen. Not only can it help organi-
zations safeguard the privacy of their customers, but it can also improve customer experience along the way.
Dr. Kornel Laskowski is principal speech scientist at Voci Technologies.
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