Shinesa Cambric is on a mission to drive innovation for cybersecurity at Microsoft. Moreover, by embracing diversity and opening all channels towards collaboration her team tackles anti-abuse and delivers fraud-defence. Continuous Improvement doesn’t just play into her role, it defines it…
“In the fraud and abuse space, attackers are constantly trying to identify ways to look like a legitimate user,” warns Shinesa. “Similarly, my team, and our partners, have to continuously adapt. We identify new patterns and behaviours to detect fraudsters. Correspondingly, we must do it in such a way we don’t impact our truly ‘good’ and legitimate users.
Microsoft is a global consumer business. When you add friction or an unpleasant experience for a consumer, you risk losing them, their business and potentially their trust. My team’s work sits on the very edge of the account sign-up and sign-in process. We are essentially the first touch within the customer funnel for Microsoft – a multi-billion dollar company.”
A Continuous Improvement journey in Cybersecurity
Working at the intersection of cybersecurity, governance & policy, fraud and abuse management presents a tangled web with many dimensions to consider. These include: privacy laws and requirements, fraudulent cloud environments and license abuse and account takeover (ATO). Shinesa’s team handle external abuse complaints, payment fraud detection and response and business impersonation. Additionally, they cover IRSF (International Revenue Sharing Fraud) telephony fraud, cheat codes, fraudulent reward redemptions, abuse of trust relationships between cloud environments, and more.
Heading up a team of six, working with numerous partners, the big thing for Shinesa’s team is moving manual processes towards automation. Moreover, leveraging AI and Machine Learning is key.
“Partnerships with Microsoft’s data science teams, and engineering departments around the company are vital,” she notes. “We’re at the front end of identities coming into our entire consumer ecosystem. Indeed, managing any system of this size manually isn’t sustainable. Also, we place significant importance on optimising protections. Once those identities are in, they have access to resources like cloud storage, and to services like Outlook, Xbox and more depending upon what they’ve signed up for.
“Fraud and abuse of these resources and services can look completely different. My team is not necessarily an expert in all of those services, so we need to build collaboration with the partner teams who are. We have feedback loops to share signals of fraud across Microsoft services and whether or not we think a specific identity is trustworthy, but each of these services have the ability to share signal back with us to answer, ‘What does good look like within your specific service or environment?’ and we use that so we can protect Microsoft as a whole.’”
