It’s a trend that has stood the test of time. Whenever something is a hit with consumers, everybody wants a piece of it. The same is true for cyber criminals, who are basically opportunists that operate on the wrong side of the law. Every time a new technology or social networking service hits a cord with the mainstream, hackers aren’t far behind.

While we know fraudsters can’t resist a sure thing, Craig Scroggie, vice president and managing director of Symantec in the Pacific region, said most of the time consumers turn a deaf ear to such warnings until it is too late. In the article, “Cybercrime to hit tablets,” Scroggie, who has warned consumers about potential threats to email, fake websites and computers in the past, is at it again. This time he says the proliferation of smartphones and tablet devices will soon face the same type of attacks PC owners have long suffered. (more…)

When it comes to managing risk for online transactions, we get a lot of questions about how our approach compares to other commercial solutions. Establishing business rules and risk scoring in combination with device reputation ranks high among topics of interest. Simply put, iovation uses the device and transaction data available to any vendor, and combines it with the strongest database of historical device risk data available on the market today.

Risk scoring, when you boil it down, is the simple process of taking the data you have available about a given transaction and the device requesting that transaction, and measuring characteristics that would lead you to believe that it is either valid or risky. Most device-based risk scores, including those offered by iovation, incorporate common types of risk elements in their scoring. These may include:

• Velocity-based Rules – Measuring device activity in a given time frame
• Transaction Anomalies – Device characteristics that indicate the device is masking its identity, such as using an anonymizing proxy, or disabling technologies like flash

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The White House’s new plan for strengthening authentication and identity verification on the web is a good first step for securing identities in online transactions and creating a trusted digital environment. In the draft strategy, entitled the “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace” (NSTIC), the government calls for an Identity Ecosystem, an online environment where individuals, organizations and devices trust each other because authoritative sources establish and authenticate their digital identities. (more…)

While the hot new iPad provides an exciting platform to surf the web, exchange emails and read books, users are also using the computer tablet to access their existing accounts on social networking sites, play virtual games, and make online purchases much like they would on their home computer.

This past week, iovation has seen a rapid adoption of the iPad being used at our customer sites. We’ve seen the number of iPad transactions grow by thousands every single day since the new device was made available. And these transactions aren’t just occurring within the same industry. In fact, we’re seeing iPad transactions on a multitude of verticals including travel sites, social networks, sportsbooks, dating sites, credit issuers, MMOs and online social games. And our job is to make sure that the transactions processed are from legitimate, good customers.

Topping the list of industries where we’ve seen the most online transactions this week is online communities at 45%, with the majority on social networking sites as opposed to dating sites. The second largest group was online retail, accounting for 28% of total iPad transactions. Most of those transactions occurred on travel sites. And lastly, international gambling sites such as sportsbooks came in third, at 23% of all iovation-protected iPad transactions.

So that’s where we’re helping customers, but what information do fraud teams share within our database in order to reduce fraud losses and ensure good customers have a positive experience on their site?

iovation tracks over 30 different types of bad behavior and this segmentation is important to our customers. How they treat evidence (specific types of fraud and abuse) changes across various industries. For example, an online retailer cares about mitigating chargebacks and catching criminal activity before product goes out the door, whereas an online community cares more about stopping spam, solicitations, predators and phishing attempts, in order to protect community members and maintain a safe and trusted environment.

Our customers can customize our fraud protection service to gain control over the specific transactions and activities that they correlate with high risk. This allows them to take more business with confidence and spend less time conducting costly manual reviews.

Believe it or not, within the first week of iPad sales, we have already uncovered fraudulent activity. Over half of all transactions denied from iPads were specifically related to credit card fraud. In other words, they were fraudsters attempting to monetize stolen identities on our customers’ websites.

As iPads connect to online businesses to create accounts, submit applications and make purchases, it is very important for organizations to know whether or not the device:

• has committed fraud or abuse on their site
• has committed fraud or abuse at another business
• has relationships with other devices or accounts that have been involved with fraud or abuse
• has not been seen before, but matches the profile of other high-risk or suspect devices

As iovation’s global shared database of over 275 million devices grows, so do the reputations of iPads used to request transactions. This is important information that companies can use to determine whether or not a transaction requested by an iPad, or any other Internet device, can be trusted and just the kind of information iovation provides to its valued customers.

It’s been said that the best offense is a good defense. But how do you defend against something that’s always changing? That’s an important question for IT security professionals who know that it’s only a matter of time before cyber criminals find ways to take advantage of the inherent weaknesses in even the best technologies.

The harsh reality is that today’s cyber criminals are so tech savvy and innovative that staying one step ahead of them isn’t always possible. That’s why, when it comes to network security, a good defense should be made up of several different layers. That way, even if a hacker is able to exploit vulnerability in one layer of the system, he may be stopped or slowed down by another. This strategy, known as defense in depth, essentially allows organizations to protect the integrity of their systems by slowing hackers down and buying security professionals the time they need to respond to a security breach once it has occurred. This mitigates the damage that malicious hackers can do, even if they are able to make it past initial barriers. (more…)