VOICE SECURITY – Financial Services
Case Study
Defending contact center agents and customer accounts against an onslaught of criminal vishing attacks was reaching a crisis point.
Summary
The Client
Large Blue Cross Blue Shield-affiliated health insurer serving approximately seven million members.
The Problem
This health insurance provider’s Contact Center was under relentless attack from voice-based adversaries utilizing social engineering and vishing techniques to obtain member PII (Personally Identifiable Information) with the intent to take over member accounts.
A Security Assessment revealed 26% of inbound calls were threats. And, Contact Center Agents had a 100% failure during a Vishing PEN Test.
The Impact
- Members (customers) experienced a diminished user experience with worsening customer satisfaction.
- Contact Center Agents were increasingly unproductive, hesitant in serving callers, and sharply diminished in their ability to deliver quality service.
- The Organization saw increasing risk and growing potential liability with an escalating likelihood of a cyberbreach.
The Solution
Mutare’s multi-layered voice firewall immediately eliminated the lion’s share of social engineering and vishing voice-based threats, dramatically diminishing the security risk associated with the malicious account take-over scheme.
Customer Perspective
Contact Center Technology Manager
“We are excited to have this kind of protection from the Mutare Voice Traffic Filter for our agents and member beneficiaries.
It is a relief having one less thing to worry about.”
Full Story
The Impact
According to the organization’s manager of contact center technologies, there was an acceleration of this activity following the massive 2024 Change Healthcare breach which exposed the personal identifying information of 190 million individuals. “We have to assume that the billing information of many of our members was also exposed in that breach, and that bad actors were now using it to try to defraud us.”
Fueling further suspicion, these nefarious calls often had consistent patterns. Threat agents posing as beneficiaries were calling for assistance in opening their member portal. If access was gained, they would then change the password and email address in order to cash in on the member’s reward points. Calls were also being placed in sequence from similar numbers, and changed email addresses shared common domains not related to that of the original beneficiary or group policyholder.
Security and IT teams were pulling call records several times a day to look for these suspicious patterns, while manual analysis of audio revealed red-flag inconsistencies in caller voice and background sounds.
“Savvy agents were able to pick up on suspicious behaviors, but it wasn’t always obvious,” notes their contact center technology manager.
In order to stay ahead of a potential crisis, this organization took the extra step to hire a penetration testing firm to test the resistance strength of agents against simulated social engineering attacks. The result: Nearly 100% of tested agents failed to adequately protect customer information that could enable unauthorized member portal access and account takeover.
Voice Security Made Possible
Needing no further proof that agent training and current mitigation efforts were simply not enough to combat the persistent threat of voice-based attacks, this organization contacted their technology business partner, who introduced them to Mutare and Mutare’s Voice Traffic Filter. Mutare provided a voice security analysis of their incoming traffic which revealed at least 26% of incoming calls were clearly unwanted, with a large percentage deemed potentially criminal.
Following a demonstration of Mutare’s multi-layered call analysis and filtering capabilities, this organization quickly agreed to purchase Voice Traffic Filter with the promise of rapid implementation for its on-premise voice system.
Applying the Right Voice Security Solution
While taking care of their immediate voice security needs, Voice Traffic Filter is also well-positioned for the future, as this organization will be migrating its contact center to a cloud-based CCaaS platform. Mutare’s flexibility with both on-premise and hosted deployments, as well as its simple API integration with leading CCaaS providers, promises seamless migration and integration with a broad spectrum of UC, CC, and CCaaS environments.
