Summary

FINRA has received an increasing number of reports regarding customer account takeover (ATO) incidents, which involve bad actors using compromised customer information, such as login credentials (i.e., username and password), to gain unauthorized entry to customers’ online brokerage accounts.

To help firms prevent, detect and respond to such attacks, FINRA recently organized roundtable discussions with representatives from 20 firms of various sizes and business models to discuss their approaches to mitigating the risks from ATO attacks.