Delivered as a cloud service, the ThreatMetrix Fraud Network provides IT, e-commerce, security and fraud professionals with a rich set of tools for verifying new accounts, authorizing payments and transactions, and authorizing user logins, all in real-time without customers providing personally identifiable information (PII).

Most fraud prevention and customer authentication systems use PII to determine whether a customer is legitimate or a fraudster. But sophisticated cyber criminals can easily circumvent this challenge, and web users are increasingly reluctant to share personal information when shopping, sharing and banking online. ThreatMetrix device identification solutions, which profile the computer used to create an account or execute a transaction, are popular among security professionals because they don't require the use of PII to assess customer legitimacy. Instead, ThreatMetrix' unique packet signature analysis technology detects the use of botnets and proxies, and reveals the true location of the device as well as the device's identity.

On the other hand, device information is but one data point. To truly assess legitimacy, fraud prevention professionals and e-commerce marketing experts need a more complete picture of the customer. That's where the ThreatMetrix Fraud Network comes in. The web-based system utilizes a wide variety of device- and transaction-related data, not including PII, to build a "contextual score" that delivers all the information security pros need to make a thoughtful "go, no-go" decision about a customer. Among the data gathered by the ThreatMetrix Fraud Network is deep intelligence about the device, key transaction details and past behavior, both on-site and globally.

The ThreatMetrix Fraud Network is unique among fraud detection solutions because it's capable of addressing all three of the major web fraud scenarios: verifying customers, authorizing transactions and authenticating users. If a transaction originates offshore from behind a botnet, the ThreatMetrix Fraud Network doesn't need to know the identity of the person in order to alert the security pro that a customer is high risk.

ThreatMetrix presents a contextual score to the fraud and professional security professional via web portal or data warehouse. Built from the ground up to make fraud easier to analyze, report and prevent, the web portal provides users with access to an updated fraud engine rules editor that is context aware including the ability to instantly review and analyze transactions based on date, score, status, or any other attribute across the global network. It can automatically add transaction and device identifiers to blacklists and whitelists with the click of a button, and it can search transactions according to any attribute. Likewise, the data warehouse aggregates information and generates graphical reports so users can spot fraud trends early and tune their risk models accordingly.

The ThreatMetrix Fraud Network is built on a distributed architecture. This design provides for real-time data processing and delivery, Internet scalability, shared intelligence across components, redundancy and speed. The ThreatMetrix Fraud Network can operate as a standalone fraud prevention system. It can also serve as middleware, enabling IT architects to leverage investments in existing fraud prevention and authentication systems. The ThreatMetrix Fraud Network comes with out-of-the-box integrations to many leading fraud prevention platforms.

"Our research shows an overwhelming majority of consumers are very concerned about the threat of falling victim to online fraud and, indeed, nearly half have experienced some type of fraud as a result of their use of the Internet," said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder, Ponemon Institute. "What this study also found is that consumers would readily embrace technologies that would shield them from becoming the victims of fraud without requiring them to divulge personal information."

"We're changing the rules of online fraud prevention with the introduction of the ThreatMetrix Fraud Network," said Reed Taussig, president and CEO, ThreatMetrix. "Typical fraud prevention solutions rely on IP intelligence which is easy to spoof with proxies or require the use of PII which fraudsters are quickly able to exploit based on recent data breaches and the popularity of social networks. The ThreatMetrix Fraud Network addresses this imbalance through contextual scoring based on global transaction data and authentication history of devices and credentials used in transactions -- all without requiring PII or sharing of reputation information."