Why Leveraging Global Network Intelligence is a Necessity in Protecting Your Organization Against Threats
- Cheria Poole
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 55 minutes ago
Guest Editorial by Cheria Poole, Director of Fraud and Identity, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
Cybercriminals are fast and sophisticated, but their real threat is their efficiency within a highly interconnected digital ecosystem.
Cybercriminals themselves often exist in matrixed fraud organizations, reusing tactics across industries, adapting when blocked and operating on a global scale, which makes them extremely efficient and effective.
When organizations don’t protect themselves, the damage is great. In fact, the average cost of every $1 of fraud loss for U.S. financial services exceeds more than $5.1 Financial losses erode consumer trust and increase operational costs. What becomes clear is that no single organization has everything they need to protect against these attacks. Many rely solely on in-house knowledge of threats, which creates a significant intelligence gap between cybercriminals and the organizations defending against them. It is near impossible to protect against coordinated, persistent attackers that leverage information across industries without a higher-level perspective of fraudsters’ schemes and methods. Global contributory risk intelligence is the key to protecting data, the organization and its consumers, and provides cross-industry insight that is not just a convenience, but a fast and adaptive strategic necessity.
The Real Danger Lying Beneath the Surface
Even the most sophisticated and technologically advanced enterprises cannot capture the full threat landscape. While enterprise data can reveal how attackers target an organization, it does not reveal how attackers target peers or utilize other industries (think telcos, retail or financial services). Such information can serve as a valuable warning signal about the kinds of attacks the business can expect next.
There are three key limitations with in-house only fraud strategies:
First-time attacks: New devices, emails and phones can appear clean while having negative signals in other industries. Without shared context, an organization can expose itself to great risks.
Fragmented views of consumer identities: Synthetic identities “shape-shift” across institutions. What appears as low risk to an ecommerce company could be a confirmed fraud to multiple financial institutions.
Detection cycle lagging: By the time an organization adapts to a known attack, it may be too late to do anything about it. A global, cross-industry view could have provided the risk signals much quicker than in-house signals alone.
The Advantage of Contributory Intelligence Networks
Fraud does not respect boundaries; we must consider emerging patterns. In 2024, a cyber incident showed how a single account takeover led to a breach compromising hundreds of businesses and leaking thousands of telephone records. Another example of this is synthetic identities that start in unsecured credit applications and graduate to telecom, utilities and other industry accounts, eventually making their way to defraud financial services. Since we know that cyber criminals reuse infrastructure, tactics and attack vectors, cross-industry risk signals would clearly be of more value than siloed defense systems.
So why should even the most advanced organizations opt for a contributory network? Contributory intelligence helps aggregate and normalize risk signals across industries worldwide while protecting data privacy. When done correctly, it offers precise insights, as the risk signals return sharpened risk differentiation and reduce false positives.
A contributory intelligence network also supports advanced threat detection. Organizations benefit when risk signals surface early, even if another member of the network encounters the attack first. Lastly, since organizations detect broader, comprehensive patterns, they can build stronger defenses that are proactive and predictive, not just reactive after a loss.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Contributory Network Intelligence
Organizations that leverage contributory network insights can see improvements across all business lifecycles. Here are some real-life examples of network intelligence in digital channels delivering a big impact:
Onboarding: Catch synthetics and repeat abusers before account creation and reduce unnecessary friction for legitimate customers with better confidence scores.
Authentication and sessions: Spot device and behavior anomalies faster and adapt step-up challenges without overburdening good users.
Payments and transactions: Block mule activity and promotion abuse patterns seen elsewhere in real time, preempting emerging rings rather than tuning post-loss.
Investigations: Accelerate case triage with richer, cross-sourced context and focus analysts on high-value work.
As a result, we have observed high-level benefits for contributory network participants, such as lower fraud losses, reduced operational costs and higher consumer satisfaction and approval rates. It is a win-win for security and consumer experience.
Threat actors crowdsource, so defenders should too. In a world where cybercriminals adapt and morph across borders and sectors, going it alone is a losing strategy. Leveraging cross-industry, global network intelligence transforms fragmented visibility into collective foresight, allowing you to defend earlier, approve smarter and operate with more confidence.
Cheria Poole is a senior fraud and identity strategy leader with more than a decade of experience driving product innovation, market strategy and revenue growth across multiple industries. As a director of Fraud and Identity Market Planning at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, she has deep expertise in digital and physical identity verification, as well as fraud risk and authentication tools to help deliver scalable, market‑driven solutions to businesses across sectors. She is a recognized mentor and a member of the Women of Identity organization and has a passion to serve the community around her.