The Internet has brought numerous benefits into our lives, which was made even more evident since the Covid 19 pandemic started. We were all forced to change the way we live and embrace the digital world more than ever. It provides us with a means to communicate and connect with other people and stay social even when we have had to reduce our social contacts, it allows us to continue educating and improving ourselves or even to reduce the risk in our lives by working from home. Not to mention how much the e-commerce businesses had to grow in the previous year. Now, you can access products anywhere in the world from the comfort of your home, and have it delivered to you within days. None of this would be possible without development of the Internet.
Online businesses and organizations now have more users than ever accessing their services, but that unfortunately brings also some disadvantages. Did you know that there are over 5 billion people online, over 40,000 Google searches happening every second and that just this year there were over 56 million websites hacked by September? Have you done everything in your power to ensure your website or business don’t become a part of the statistics? Learn how device fingerprinting helps companies to protect themselves from cyber attacks and keep your business safe.
What is device fingerprinting?
Device fingerprinting is a process of collecting and combining different attributes of a user’s device to create a unique profile of that user. It can collect various different attributes like what device you are using, what operating system is on it, device’s IP address, what version of the web browser is being used, or even the language and location settings. All of these attributes create a unique fingerprint for each user, just like the lines on your finger create your own fingerprint. And just like with your fingerprint some people might have the similar line patterns like you do, but there will always be some differences.
How does device fingerprinting help to analyze user intent?
Even though the device fingerprinting is most commonly used in analytics and marketing it can be an indispensable tool for fraud prevention. It has been extremely unutilized in that area until now, and it is time to change that. Cyber crimes are on the rise, and nobody is safe anymore. From big, high-profile companies, to small mom-and-pop businesses everyone can become a target. Many types of online fraud depend on the ability of the cyber criminal to pretend they are the legitimate user and device fingerprinting can make that difficult for them. Device fingerprinting can be used not only to confirm the identity of the customers, but also to determine if their intent is legitimate or malicious.
One type of cyber fraud where device fingerprinting can be the most useful is account takeover. With this type of fraud cyber criminals manage to get access to a user’s login credentials so they can take over their account. They use these credentials to log in on that eCommerce site and make purchases, transfer funds, and use it in any other way they can. With the device fingerprinting the ecommerce site can see that the account is being accessed from a different and unfamiliar device and it can take further actions like restricting the account, alerting the account owner or requiring two-factor authentication.
It can also be used to recognize and stop card testing fraud. Cyber criminals can obtain large numbers of stolen credit card numbers which they need to test to see which ones are still usable and which ones were already blocked due to being reported lost or stolen. They try to make a small purchase with every card and if the payment goes through the card is valid and can be used for other fraudulent activities. If the company is using device fingerprinting, they can see that the same device has been trying to process payments from various cards and had several declined transactions which screams malicious intent. Then they can block that device from future purchase and stop the fraud before it even happens.
It can also be extremely useful to analyze the intent of the customers within the banking industry. As most people are always using the same devices to access their online banking services, it is considered suspicious when the user logins from a different device, location or suspicious IP address.
By analyzing user intent the companies and organizations will be able to prevent fraud before it even happens, and protect their users and their confidential data.
