This week the Associated Press reported that a Miami man and two Russian co-conspirators stole over 130 million credit card numbers in the largest theft of credit information ever.

Anyone who doesn’t think that online crime has transitioned into big time business should take note.  Online criminals are coordinated and remarkably well organized. They are becoming increasingly adept and efficient at not only obtaining, but sharing, valuable data: namely credit and identity information.

The extent to which online commerce companies rely on their ability to trust in this very same data cannot be overstated. Today, most online transactions are checked for fraud based upon credit and identity checks. If trust in that data is undermined, then the business models of hundreds of thousands of online retailers will suffer.

As we have stated many times before, the use of identity and credit-based checks is an essential part of the online purchasing process, but it is not a complete solution. Businesses need to have a way to check for fraud based on data that is not as easily compromised as credit and identity information. Device fingerprinting solutions, such as our device reputation service, offer that ability.

Device reputation provides significant uplift in fighting fraud because it is independent of the data used in so many of today’s attacks. Things that were previously completely invisible, such as repeat offenders and relationships between organized criminals, now come to light. Device reputation, at its most basic level, uses the ability to identify and re-recognize a PC in order to track that computer’s history of fraud and abuse—all without using any personal information. Those device reputations can then be shared among online businesses so that an entire online community can work together to fight this serious problem. Now, more than ever, the time has come for online businesses to give serious consideration to adopting new technologies to keep in step with an ever-evolving online world.

Tags: device fingerprint, device reputation, identity theft, Online Fraud

This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Financial Services, Online Communities, Online Gambling, Online Gaming, Online Retail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.