Building a Fraud Profile with Device ID+ (Part 2 - Analytics and Reporting)

Overview

Today there are at least 4.9 million websites using reCAPTCHA, including 28% of the Alexa top 10,000 sites. Google’s reCAPTCHA service is a free offering and developers have been using it for years to try and defend against automation. Many cyber security vendors embed it in their core offering where customers pay subscription service fees for these vendors to “manage” reCAPTCHA and the data it produces.

TL;DR - reCAPTCHA is probably causing revenue leakage, false positives and allowing abuse of the web properties that it’s deployed on. How do I know? Watch this demo video I put together the other day. The link is time bookmarked to start at 5:13. The video shows me logging in across 2 different browser sessions and reCAPTCHA returning false positives.

Additionally, a simple search on Google or Github reveals the problems that developers face when using reCAPTCHA.

reCAPTCHA is embedded into the web’s top sites because it’s free and seems to work. Or does it? What do I mean by “seems to work”? It depends on the business and the type of website, but “works” in this context typically means making the bot or automation problem go away.

While developers have been laser focused on solving problems around bot nets, fraudulent users, and overall noise hitting the system, they’ve forgotten about user friction and revenue. In fact, revenue and user friction may be an afterthought for most developers because they don’t see the opportunity to remove friction and again, they have tunnel vision on fixing one particular problem. (For the record I’m not blaming developers, just stating the reality of most engineering organizations and how tasks are managed.)

Let’s take a step back. Fraud detection is a framework within web applications and the creation and ongoing maintenance warrants a good bit of architecture and thought. That’s why I’ve been on a pursuit to research and expose the development of a “Fraud Framework” or “Fraud Profile” across the cybersecurity industry. I want to give developers a resource for greenfield projects and rewrites. A place that is open and information flows freely to make the web a safer place. That’s why I started the conversation in Part 1 and I plan on writing as many articles as possible to open up this well-kept secret across the industry. Experienced security engineers are highly sought after because they have been through the pains of developing these systems and architectures. Not only creating them, but making use of the fraud data that they generate. My goal is to make this knowledge freely accessible through this series of articles.

This article and video serve as a stepping-stone in my research. In Part 1, we reviewed a simple NodeJS web application that implements a device identifier service to keep the existing fraud system in check, remove user friction and defend against fraudulent activity. The article demonstrates how to add F5’s Device ID+ to an existing application that already uses a basic bot defense or fraud scoring system – in this case reCAPTCHA.

Let’s take a look at the live data from our example application deployed at deviceid.dev/v3 to:

• Analyze user login and transactional scoring data.
• Understand how well our fraud scoring system is working by looking at good user data.
• Gain insight into how Device ID+ improves Fraud analytics.
• Find areas to make changes to our application to remove user friction.

Conclusion and Next Steps

The example analysis of our Fraud Profile is just the beginning of what can be accomplished with a trustable device identifier. Analytics around user behavior and malicious intent can now be uncovered in new ways in fraud reporting.

Device ID+ usage spans a broad set of use cases across the enterprise and is complementary to any existing fraud or bot solutions. If you have input or ideas on how you’d like me to extend this article series, please mention them in the comments below.

For more information regarding the technical details around Device ID+, see the documentation here.

If you’d like to add Device ID+ to your own application, you can sign up for a free account here.