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:

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…)

At iovation, we understood early on that you can’t successfully fight evolving online fraud and abuse alone. It takes ongoing collaboration. In other words, authentication and security providers working together to achieve a common goal – to prevent and stop fraud. That’s been our approach from day one, and it continues today.

To expand our fraud preventative services to organizations in southern Europe, we’ve partnered with AliasLab, a leading professional services, consultancy and system integrator specializing in digital signature solutions and secure data transfer. Through this partnership, AliasLab will offer iovation’s device identification service, ReputationManager 360, along with its sophisticated Out of Band (OOB) authentication solution, SecureCall Suite, which offers strong authentication, mobile payment digital signature and mobile VAS services to banking, insurance and telcos in Italy and Southern Europe.

It goes without saying that we are very proud to be partnering with an industry leader like AliasLab. This partnership is a key for iovation’s growth largely because our companies’ authentication and device reputation solutions are extremely complimentary to each other. Together, we provide a highly effective next-generation solution for authentication and fraud management. (more…)

When it comes to studying the impact of online fraud, the discussion always turns financial. For online retailers whose business models rely on Internet transactions to generate revenue, fraud losses that range anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars a year can have a significant impact on their overall business profits.

This is why combating increasingly sophisticated fraud techniques requires online merchants to identify fraudulent orders faster and boost the efficiency of their fraud management functions, without increasing overhead. For one North America retailer whose fraud losses were eating into profits and affecting the customer experience, implementing the right fraud prevention service enabled them to drop annual fraud losses from a peak of $2 million to $180,000.

In our newly downloadable case study, “Online Retailer Uses New Fraud Detection Systems To Cut Fraud Loss Rates,” Forrester Research principal analyst, Andras Cser, shares how the online merchant was able to reduce fraud loss by $1.8 million after deploying iovation’s ReputationManager 360 along with our partner’s case management system. (more…)

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) recently issued guidelines to help financial entities improve their cyber security efforts and gain a better understanding of the new, more dangerous threats they face today.

To show how layering iovation’s device reputation services with authentication technology offers a comprehensive defense-in-depth solution for exceeding the FFIEC’s new guidelines, we are hosting the upcoming webinar, “Ensuring Optimal Efficacy and Balance with Device Identification and Out-of-Wallet Questions.”

Along with Keir Breitenfeld, Senior Director at Experian Decision Analytics, I will be presenting what financial institutions need to know about how mitigating fraud risks while improving the overall customer experience, including:

1. How to achieve risk-based authentication with device reputation, authentication, scores and analytics — all while minimizing friction for the customer.

2. How to apply proportional treatment to your risk-based authentication efforts and dynamically manage credit and non-credit data questions, to fight fraud.

3. How to find optimal process points and question session configuration to strike the right balance between fraud prevention, customer experience, and cost.

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A U.S. court recently ruled that banks and financial institutions will not only be held liable for fraudulent losses from business accounts, but also bear the responsibility for protecting customers through the use of fraud detection mechanisms. This decision in no way, shape or form will change the way banks already go about detecting fraud by looking at everything from IP addresses, geolocation, velocities and anomalies that could tip off fraud professionals about potentially suspicious online transactions and other high-risk activity.

However, to ensure they stay one step ahead of today’s profit-driven fraudsters, banks need to use the most advanced, anti-fraud techniques to prevent criminals from gaining access to legitimate online bank accounts. Michael Grillo’s article, “Combating Online Banking Fraud – A Top 10 List,” provides a checklist of the essential fraud detection methods that all banks should consider to ensure they are doing everything they can to stop online fraud, including: (more…)

For the first time in six years, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) has issued new guidelines for banks to protect financial transactions targeted by today’s sophisticated cyber criminals.

In the recent Network World article, “Federal agency issues new security rules for financial institutions,” the FFIEC is instructing financial institutions to deploy layered security systems and recommends they update their risk assessments to detect anomalies and effectively respond to suspicious activity as more profit-driven hackers focus on business computers to perpetrate fraudulent online transactions.

According to the IC3 Annual Internet Crime Reports:

Cyber crime complaints have risen substantially each year since 2005, particularly with respect to commercial accounts.  Fraudsters are responsible for losses of hundreds of millions of dollars resulting from online account takeovers and unauthorized funds transfers.

The new rules instruct banks and financial institutions to focus their network defenses on layered security that involves fraud monitoring, dual customer authorization through different access devices, out-of-band verification, and technologies that limit the fraudulent transactional use of an account.

According to Scott Waddell, Vice President of Technology at iovation, who has been helping the nation’s largest financial institutions and credit issuers implement layered defense programs for years:

We’re glad to see the FFIEC guidelines catching up to the device reputation best practices that our customers enjoy. Complex device recognition, reputation, and real-time risk assessment are powerful additions to any bank’s fraud-fighting arsenal.    (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…)

I couldn’t be more thrilled upon learning about iovation being named as a finalist for the 2011 Red Herring Top 100 North American Award. It’s a real honor to be in the company of North America’s best high technology innovators, who are making significant impacts in the respective markets they serve.

Being recognized as a finalist for this prestigious award, which looks at technological innovation, financial performance, execution of strategy and management strength of private technology ventures, is a testament to our continued success in protecting the world’s largest brands from online fraud and abuse like credit card fraud, account takeover, chargebacks, money laundering and identity theft, to name a few.
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1. Data Breaches: Businesses suffer most often from data breaches, making up 35% of total breaches. Medical and healthcare services are also frequent targets, accounting for 29.1% of breaches. Government and military make up 16.2%, banking, credit, and financial services account for 10.5%, and 9.2% of breaches occur in educational institutes.

Even if you protect your PC and keep your critical security patches and antivirus definitions updated, there is always the possibility that your bank or credit card company may be hacked, and your sensitive data sold for the purposes of identity theft.

2. Social Engineering: This is the act of manipulating people into taking certain actions or disclosing sensitive information. It’s essentially a fancier, more technical form of lying.

At 2010’s Defcon, a game was played in which contestants used the telephone to convince company employees to voluntarily cough up information they probably shouldn’t have. Of 135 “targets” of the social engineering “game,” 130 blurted out sensitive information. All five holdouts were women who gave up zero data to the social engineers. (more…)

Cyberspace has become as essential to the function of daily modern life as we know it, as blood is to the function of our bodies. And I don’t believe that’s an overstatement. If the Internet suddenly vanished, there would be deaths as a result.

Our dependency on the Internet has long since passed the point of turning back, and I think we’ve made a mistake in that approach. Fortunately, it’s extremely unlikely that the Internet will go down entirely.

The U.S. and most other developed countries are thoroughly electrically and digitally dependent. Critical infrastructures, including drinking water, sewer systems, phone lines, banks, air traffic, and government systems, all depend on the electric grid. After a major successful attack, we’d be back to the dark ages in an instant. No electricity, no computers, no gasoline, no refrigeration, no clean water. Think about what happens when the power goes out for a few hours. We’re stymied. (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…)

The 8^th Annual InnoTech Oregon Conference takes place tomorrow, April 21^st at the Oregon Convention Center.  Over 1500 business and technology professionals will converge to discuss technology, innovation and marketing topics.  Among the 2011 special events taking place at the show include the 2011 SoMe Awards, 7^th Annual eMarketing Summit, NW CIO Summit, Microsoft Theater and Pavilion and the NW ISSA Security Summit. (more…)