About LBA:
The London Basketball Association is a registered charity, established in July 2012. As a charity organization, LBA’s mission is to use the sport of basketball as a gateway to solving key social issues such as obesity, physical and mental health issues, substance misuse, crime and postcode wars.
To achieve this, we work to enhance the infrastructure of basketball, making the sport easily accessible to the masses. LBA brings positive social change to the most disadvantaged communities in London through the sport of basketball.
The Challenge:
As we are a charitable organization, our main priority is to make sure that the donations we desire and receive fall into the right hands. However, one of the issues of being a charity is that it makes us a prime target for criminals who desire to use the kindness of donors in order to enrich themselves, with LBA serving as the target. If LBA’s website or payment portals were cloned or spoofed, and our donors attacked with Account Takeover or other phishing attacks, not only does it impact the donor but also LBA itself. After losing money or having their credentials compromised, the donor will be more likely to lose confidence in LBA, and not make another donation. For us at LBA, an attack would go beyond simply losing a patron. The ripple effects would result in a real decrease in the quality of activities and facilities that we provide to our members. Donations are the lifeblood of LBA and for many of our members, and every donation counts not only towards the organization but also to improving our members’ lives. We understood that, as cyberattacks on our donors become ever more frequent, we need to bolster our security online to address this attack risk. We began to search for solutions to aid us in this endeavor.
The Solution:
We came across MEMCYCO and their solution, and approached them to hear about it. MEMCYCO’s presented to us their new Proof of Site Authenticity (PoSA) solution and it seemed exactly what we were looking for. It protects and alerts in real time and provides our donors with a visual security affirmation that they are indeed on our site and not in a forged trap, via an unforgeable watermark on our website and communications and a red alert when accessing a fraudulent website. Additionally, it comes with a sophisticated alerting system that immediately lets us know whether our users are under attack and if a criminal is trying to steal our patrons’ money or credentials.
Within 3 weeks from installing PoSA, we already saw the positive effects. The watermark provides a much needed sense of security to our patrons, and they immediately know that the business they are interacting with is really us. This is also the only solution we are aware of that lets our users know, in real time, that they are accessing an impostor site – as they receive a red alert if they reached a fake.
This turned out to be profoundly important recently when we found out, via PoSA, that we were subject to an attempted cyber attack. A criminal tried to spoof our site, clone it and pose as LBA in order to steal donation money. Thanks to MEMCYCO’s solution, we were alerted immediately to the attempted attack, and donors who accessed the fake site received the red alert warning them that they were entering a fraudulent site. PoSA really saved us and our donors. This is the first time we have seen PoSA in action, and could not be happier with the result. Not only was it instant, it was extremely simple to understand.
PoSA was extremely easy to install. After signing up, our tech support team only needed to add a couple of lines of code to our web pages. The watermark simply appeared in front of us, and it was good to go. The real game changer for us is how easily it protected us and our donors and
how unintrusive it was for the user – they did not need to install anything, and all we needed to do was inform the user to start expecting this watermark as a sign they can trust the site.
Summary:
PoSA already proved its worth and saved us much more than its price. We give it a ringing endorsement. We were very impressed with its trust building abilities, and the real icing on the cake was when we saw PoSA truly guard us from an actual attack as it unfolded. We are really looking forward to see what other capabilities MEMCYCO will add to its suite, and what other innovative features PoSA will introduce.
Anthony Lazare
CEO
