Since when did hackers start worrying about moral turpitude? In the underground cybercrime economy where lies, deception and maintaining complete anonymity are the key attributes for success, I find it ironic that trust, yes trust, has climbed the ladder of qualifications that today’s online fraudsters need to profit in the digital black market.

In the article, “Cybercrime is now a booming industry,” the new Global Risks for 2012 report says that along with a steady increase in cyber attacks on businesses and governments around the globe, the top concern for illegal digital data sellers is maintaining trust with their customers.

According to an ethical hacker in India, the digital black market has become so competitive that entrepreneurial cyber criminals depend on their trustworthiness, along with free trials, discounted offers and money-back guarantees on stolen goods, to succeed in the shady underworld. (more…)

Tonight the 2012 ICE Totally Gaming Conference & Exhibition kicked off at 8 Northumberland in London with the Totally Gaming Awards banquet. Celebrity presenter Katie Derham hosted the banquet, which was designed to cover all gaming sectors along with media, marketing, and outstanding contribution awards. The 2012 awards were open to all suppliers and operators in the European gaming market and recognized and rewarded innovation, as well as great products and services from the gaming industry.

Here are some of tonight’s 2012 Totally Gaming Award winners:

• 888.com for Best Online Product of the Year (iovation was a finalist)
• Betfair for iPhone for Best Mobile Gaming Product
• Holland Casino Amsterdam for Best Casino Operator
• Jan Jones and Ron Goudsmit for Outstanding Service to the Land-Based Industry
• Wes Himes for Outstanding Service to the Remote Industry
• Novomatic for the Media Award
• Inspired Gaming Group for Best Betting Product
• Casinos Austria for Best Marketing Campaign
• Casino Cosmopol Sun vaal for Best Casino 
• Raff Ltd for Best Lottery Product
• JMC Global for Best Street Supplier 

Next up on the ICE agenda is the Combating Cybercrime in Gaming conference at Earls Court. Starting Tuesday, January 24th, attendees will find a great line-up of topics, including jurisdictional approaches to investigating cybercrime, knowing “who” and “where” your gaming customers are, implementing strategies to reduce data leakage from your network, cybercrime hotspots and forecasting future threats, and staying ahead of mobile gaming fraudsters.

iovation’s vice president of global sales, Max Anhoury, leads the mobile gaming fraud panel at 2:00 pm, titled Staying One Step Ahead of Mobile Fraudsters, to help attendees understand the latest cybercrime threats and how gaming operators can better protect their business, brand and customers.  Joining Mr. Anhoury will be Darwyn Palenzuela, Chief Technology Officer at Smart Gaming Group and Christina Thakor-Rakin, Head of Operations at Virgin Games. iovation will be sharing worldwide mobile device trends from its global reputation database of more than 800 million unique devices, which includes PCs, laptops, smartphones, tablets and consoles.  (more…)

Turns out, crime does pay, at least for hackers committing identity theft over the Internet.

In the article, “Why Internet crimes go unpunished,” security expert Roger Grimes breaks down some interesting numbers around cybercrime, and how hackers are (to put it mildly) beating the odds. According to the FBI’s 2011 Internet Crime Report, of the more than 300,000 complaints that netted criminals $1.1 billion in 2010, law enforcement agencies convicted an average of one crook for every 50,635 victims. In other words, as Grimes eloquently states:

Steal someone’s identity and your odds of being caught are almost infinitesimal.

With all the hacks and fraud headlines 2011 will be remembered for, that’s definitely not the way we want to ring in the New Year. But as Grimes also warns, if we aren’t careful we could see history repeat itself as criminals not only continue defrauding computer users, but launch recycled attacks against the explosion of worldwide mobile device users, who could fall victim to the same old PC tricks. (more…)

iovation is continually developing new features to meet customer business challenges, keep pace with the constantly changing Internet environment, respond to great customer ideas, and meet our own internal strategic goals.

It’s been a busy year with a ton of new features and enhancements ranging from big to small. We thought we’d take a moment to share with you some of the highlights from 2011.

As with any technology, there are many, many things that go into a new feature including design, development, testing, documentation, integration and other operational requirements. We won’t go into that amount of detail here, but instead will focus on the primary achievements within each of the four principle areas of specialization at iovation, which include:

When it comes to online gaming products, most people tend to think about the fun stuff like the enormously popular interactive role-playing games or international poker sites. What often gets lost in the conversation are the products behind the customer-facing games. Not surprisingly, I’m referring to the security tools that protect online businesses and the millions of users who put their trust and hard-earned cash into virtual games that provide countless hours of entertainment from their PCs, laptops and mobile devices.

Take, for example, a fraud prevention service like iovation’s ReputationManager 360. Using advanced device reputation technology, we work behind the scenes in many of the world’s largest and most respected gaming environments to provide protection from all forms of fraud and abuse. In the past year, we’ve provided invaluable intelligence on more than 475 million gaming transactions.

At iovation, we’re happy to play the role of the unsung hero. But every now and then it’s an honor to be recognized by industry leaders who call out the important work that we do. This is why we are so proud to announce that the distinguished ICE Totally Gaming panel has named iovation a finalist for the Best Online Gaming Product of the Year. (more…)

A few week’s back, I wrote how iovation’s fraud prevention service had been named as a finalist for the 2011 Red Herring 100 Global Award. This week we are proud to announce that iovation was named a Top 100 Global Company.

It’s truly an honor to follow in the footsteps of some of the most recognizable technology companies in the world such as Google, YouTube, Skype and eBay, who have all been previously selected to Red Herring’s prestigious Top 100 Global list.

This recognition is a direct result of years of hard work evolving our fraud protection service into a full spectrum device reputation solution that supports native and web integrations for mobile and desktop devices, tagged and tagless device recognition, real-time transparent risk scoring, and on-demand and scheduled reporting. Our remarkable growth is attributed to the collaborative work and effectiveness of our global device intelligence network, which today protects billions of transactions for our clients representing multiple industries around the globe. (more…)

While the term “online abuse” often conjures up thoughts of cyber bullying, predatory behavior and customer harassment, Internet-based businesses that experience abusive activity within their social communities have to immediately address customer trust and confidence issues. Otherwise, they risk unwanted conduct between subscribers, which can ultimately lead to financial implications for the organization.

We all know that the top priority for any IT fraud team is to ensure their good customers can safely and easily communicate and do business within their online environment. However, because many business websites have networking communities that bring likeminded individuals together to socialize, the potential for users or criminals to act inappropriately towards others can create problems that can impact the user experience. (more…)

It has been a while since my last blog post as the infrastructure team at iovation has been hard at work building out our latest data center in the Westin Building located in Seattle. This new data center is situated in a brand new state-of-the-art facility within the Westin Building which I am going to walk you through here today. We find that in the SaaS industry the quality of provider’s facilities varies widely (and is very opaque) and so we are going to do our best to be transparent here by using photos liberally.

The Westin Building is easily the best connected facility in the Northwest United States. Via our patch panel in the meet-me-room we can rapidly connect to dozens of global telecommunications carriers serving the US, Asia, Canada, Europe, and the rest of the world with a simple fiber optic jumper cable. This facility is also home to the Seattle Internet Exchange on which we are a member.

If you are an iovation customer and would like to directly connect to us within this facility or across the SIX please contact me.

From an infrastructure point of view, keeping the iovation service online at all times and keeping the “bad guys” from harming our customers is always Job #1. To do this, we employ many levels of redundancy, both within a given facility, and between multiple facilities. As with any data center, this starts with the electrical power feeding the facility. Every piece of iovation equipment is fed from dual power sources which are completely redundant all the way back to the power utility. It should also be noted that power failures in Seattle are nearly nonexistent as the grid is extremely robust (fed largely by hydro-power).   (more…)

While everyone here at iovation is ecstatic about making the Portland Business Journal’s 2011 list of the Top 100 fastest-growing privately held companies, none of this would have been possible without the outstanding customer service our employees have provided through the years. (more…)

I’m very proud to announce that iovation was recently positioned in the Visionary Quadrant of Gartner’s 2011 Magic Quadrant for the Web Fraud Detection. For a security provider who’s been helping customers across many industries prevent online fraud since 2004, we are pleased to receive this position in the analyst firm’s annual report.

The Visionary section of the Magic Quadrant recognizes security vendors whose products are easy to implement and have successfully reduced online fraud for their customers.   (more…)

Since our inception, the online gaming industry has been a very important sector for us. This is why I am so excited that iovation’s ReputationManager 360 has been awarded Casino Journal’s Top 20 Most Innovative Technologies in Gaming Award, which recognizes outstanding fraud prevention services helping international online gaming companies stop fraud and abuse.

With criminals targeting online casinos around the clock (we’ve got the data to prove it!), gaming sites need all the help they can get to rid their tables of costly criminal activity such as credit card fraud, chargebacks, account takeover and player collusion. Leveraging iovation’s global database of over 600 million unique devices, our gaming customers gain deep insight into every device, whether it’s a PC, smartphone or tablet, attempting to login or play on their site. Using customizable business rules that allow them to assess risk at various integration points, online gaming providers will spot characteristics that are consistent with fraud and abuse to stop criminals before they strike. (more…)

As an online fraud prevention company, our goal at iovation is simple: To protect our clients from harmful online activity that can negatively impact their business and customers. Improving our clients’ businesses by greatly reducing fraud and abuse rates is the ultimate reward. Being recognized by our peers is just icing on the cake. This week, we were proud to announce that we had our cake and ate it, too.

On Monday, we were named by AlwaysOn and industry experts as one of the 2011 OnDemand Top 100 winners, which recognizes leadership and game-changing approaches and technologies likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players. iovation was chosen for our unique ability to detect online fraudulent activity in real-time and keep our clients’ businesses and customers safe. (more…)

Fraud prevention requires layers of defense. Mature fraud organizations often have several layers that interrogate the transaction details such as name, address, and credit card details, device reputation that starts with device identification, and risk scoring on rules developed over time to detect fraud attempts as well as predict new types of attacks.

In order for the business rules engines to be productive, the rules they operate on need to reflect the particular risks the organization faces. When it comes to customizing business rules, this is not a “one size fits all” model. Giving a retailer, financial institution, or gaming company the ability to easily create and manage rules that are run against their transactions requires a tool that makes it simple to see, add, edit, and experiment with rules.

The iovation business rules editor provides great flexibility in managing the set of rules to be reviewed for transactions such as login, account creation, account change, and checkout. Rule sets are the collections of rules for each end-customer touch point. Rules can be added with a familiar drag-and-drop, enabled and disabled with one click, parameters can be adjusted, and lists of common items can be managed and included. An example of a list is a ‘risky ISP list’, where the user can create a list of risky ISPs and use that same list in multiple rules. If the list changes, all rules leveraging that list will be immediately updated. New rules can be evaluated without impacting scoring results by giving them a zero weight and tracking how frequently they are triggered.

The iovation rules editor provides additional flexibility to help you keep up with the evolution of fraud while protecting your business.

Do you gamble online? Millions outside the U.S. do and love it. My gaming experience consists of online Solitare and Tetris, which shows you how adventurous I am. But for those who gamble online, there can be significant risks.

The same cyber criminals targeting banks and retailers working hard to collect and sell stolen personal data, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and credit card details, are using those stolen identities to win big in defrauding online gambling sites.

And as more people turn to online poker, bingo, sportsbooks, and betting sites, cyber criminals are developing more sophisticated ways to take advantage of legitimate players and the gambling sites themselves. Financial fraud such as chargebacks and money laundering are major issues for gambling operators, not to mention player collusion and bonus abuse. Plus, the operators have the responsibility of keeping problem gamblers (self-excluders) from re-entering their sites.

Bonus incentives, as explained in this case study on WagerWorks, are offered to attract new players to games and to increase overall play time, but these incentives also attract the attention of cyber criminals since they can set up multiple accounts under stolen identities, and take advantage of the free money offered for each new account. (more…)

Being a sales leader at iovation is an exciting and interesting job. I get to work with companies across a wide spectrum of industries spanning from the traditional, like financial services and retail, to the unique and new – such as gaming, community sites and gambling. On a daily basis, I get to talk with experienced professionals who are focused on a problem that is fundamental to preserving their company’s profitability and viability. One thing I’ve found in these discussions, is that when it comes to stopping fraud and managing risk they have a lot in common. Risk is no longer simply about meeting compliance guidelines, it’s an essential element of online businesses’ strategy.

There is a great recent article in Government Info Security that examines this change titled appropriately, “The Evolution of Risk.” It gives a nice look at the role risk managers play in key strategic decisions and how stopping and analyzing the sources of fraud has been escalated in importance over the past couple of decades. (more…)