Stop Fraud Sooner — at the Edge

As we push the boundaries of the network edge closer to the users and locations where computing power is needed, service providers are able to minimize latency, reduce bandwidth consumption and optimize the performance of their applications. With faster, real-time data processing, edge computing is particularly beneficial in scenarios where quick decisioning is critical — making it ideal for fraud prevention.

Moreover, edge-based risk and trust detection is a great way to, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” enabling you to observe user behavior and analyze their intentions at inception, before a malicious plot can unfold. 

By deploying fraud prevention at the network edge, you can stop attacks sooner, minimizing the impact on your IT resources, costs, customers and their accounts. 

In this article, we’ll explain how edge-based fraud prevention works and why it’s now an essential part of a multi-layered security strategy in the fight against today’s rapidly-evolving fraud.  

Preventing fraud at the edge lowers costs

Proactive fraud protection is more critical than ever as fraud costs reached nearly $500B in 2023. A contributing factor: half of all internet traffic is driven by bots. It’s essential to distinguish between good and bad automations as malicious bots carry out account takeovers (ATO), account opening (AO) fraud and other large scale attacks. 

Fraudsters (and their bots) are supported by a thriving underground economy with massive data dumps of stolen identity information. Plus, new generative AI tools, like FraudGPT and WormGPT, help them probe for vulnerabilities and generate fraud at unprecedented volume and velocity.

By implementing identity security and fraud prevention at the network edge, you can stop attacks before they consume IT resources, reach your applications and wreak havoc. You’ll lower the cost of fraud prevention while improving security. 

Fraudsters follow the money

Attackers are increasingly targeting the network edge due to the sheer volume of data processing and transactions that occur at this crucial point. The potential for profit is attractive to fraudsters who are looking for opportunities presented by: 

• The diversity of endpoints: The wide variety of consumer devices, ranging from smartphones and tablets to laptops and desktops, connecting from many IP addresses and edge networks around the world, present unique challenges for fraud prevention in consumer apps. The diversity and sprawl often leads to inconsistencies in security protocols and practices, creating vulnerabilities that fraudsters can exploit.
  
• Sensitive information: Personal identity data, financial and private information are forms of digital currency and can be used to carry out identity theft, ATO fraud and account opening fraud.
  
• Limited security: Computation power on edge devices and infrastructure is often limited. Consider how this applies to gaming devices or autonomous cars. The need for low latency restricts the security controls that can be implemented effectively.
  
• Lack of monitoring: Minimal oversight across the vast number of distributed devices with decentralized security enables attackers to exploit weaknesses without being detected.

Edge computing’s role in fraud detection

To mitigate risks on the front lines of the edge ecosystem, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are now offering basic bot protection, SSL/TLS encryption and web application firewalls (WAF). Positioned between the user’s browser and the web server, CDNs are in an ideal location to filter traffic streams and decide what’s legitimate and what’s not. But there are limitations:  

• Lack of context: A WAF, operating at the network edge, inspects incoming traffic and blocks malicious requests based on predefined rules and patterns. As such, CDN offerings are not able to keep up with rapidly-changing fraud tactics. Lacking full visibility, they have zero ability to analyze user behavior and transactions downstream, which provides essential context for accurate fraud detection.
  
• Business outcomes: Blunt, static controls lead to more false positives and false negatives, blocking good customers or letting fraudsters and bots slip deeper into your domain. 
  
• Lack of expertise: CDNs are primarily focused on content delivery, caching web pages, videos and images to reduce latency and bandwidth usage. By adding security solutions, CDN vendors are diversifying their product lines, but cybersecurity is not their main focus. 

Integration with a threat intelligence platform (TIP)

Although CDNs process vast amounts of data, their ability to analyze risk and trust within the broader context of the full identity journey is limited — unless the WAF is integrated with a threat intelligence platform (TIP). Choosing the right TIP can significantly uplevel edge security to make it more dynamic, intelligent and proactive when defending against today’s ever-changing fraud. 

Armed with multi-dimensional, correlated threat intelligence, the WAF can adapt security measures accordingly. For instance, a TIP might inform a CDN about a new phishing campaign or a new malware distribution method, prompting the WAF to adjust its configurations to detect and block such threats. 

Maximize value with a fraud prevention vendor

By integrating your CDN’s WAF with Transmit Security Detection and Response, you get a context-aware TIP built by cybersecurity experts. With the power of AI, edge-based fraud prevention becomes smart and adaptive, allowing or blocking traffic based on timely threat intelligence about emerging fraud tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP), indicators of compromise, active threat campaigns, new vulnerabilities, fraud rings, malicious behavior and trusted customer behavior.

Transmit Security’s Multi-Method Detection leverages hundreds of mechanisms, including
bot detection, advanced behavioral biometrics, privacy-age device fingerprinting and anomaly detection — to assess risk and trust at the edge and beyond. By analyzing a broader range of signals, behaviors and devices, it detects fraud with greater accuracy.

For instance, when using a public Wi-Fi network in a coffee shop or airport, many people will share the same IP address, which may have a history of both legitimate and malicious activity. Attackers take advantage of this to evade detection. This is why our Detection and Response Service (DRS) collects and analyzes large datasets of telemetry, including application flows, mousing patterns, typing speed, device ID and event intelligence that provides enriched context.

If an attack is detected by our AI and machine learning algorithms, DRS can automatically apply timely fine-grained WAF rules to block only the malicious traffic from that IP address. This eliminates the need for manual WAF updates and cross-team incident response. With granular access controls that distinguish between legitimate users and attackers, you’ll ensure a good customer experience (CX) while improving the overall security posture.

Advantages of deploying Transmit Security at the edge: 

1. Up-to-date, context-aware security: Transforms a primitive WAF into a dynamic edge-based fraud prevention solution, leveraging a fusion of anti-fraud and identity intelligence. 
2. Adaptive protection: Detects and blocks new and evolving threats as they emerge based on context-aware intelligence. 
3. Earlier prevention: Boosts the power of your existing WAF, using automated, smart rule adjustments to accurately detect and stop fraud at the edge.
4. Lower infrastructure costs: Filters out bad bots and other malicious traffic at the web gateway — significantly reducing the load on network resources.
5. Improved performance: Mitigates attacks closer to the source, minimizing latency.
6. Expedites time-to-value: Requires no changes to your application code to collect and analyze multi-dimensional data. Transmit Security simply integrates with your existing CDN, made easier thanks to our partnerships with leading CDN providers, including Amazon CloudFront, Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly and others.
7. Better business outcomes: Ensures customers have access and fraudsters don’t.

Reap the benefits of edge-based fraud prevention that’s able to analyze traffic and intercept fraud before it penetrates deeper into your networks. Request a meeting and explore how Detection and Response works within the Transmit Security Platform.