PassMark Security, the global leader in strong, risk-based authentication for online banking and ecommerce, and Quova, the authority on IP Intelligence and leading provider of Internet geolocation data and services, today announced a technology partnership that will integrate Quova's best-in-class IP geolocation technology into PassMark's Risk Manager, greatly enhancing the system's capability to identify and prevent attempts at fraudulent network access.
Together, PassMark and Quova offer financial institutions and ecommerce providers an optimal system for strong authentication and online fraud prevention, guarding against attacks such as phishing, spoofing, key logging and identity theft. Further, as PassMark's Two-Factor, Two-Way Authentication process verifies both the user to the institution and the institution to the user at login, financial institutions can achieve compliance with FFIEC guidelines that call single-factor authentication methods such as passwords inadequate for guarding online transactions involving access to customer information.
PassMark's Risk Manager combines network and other information, automatically executing an extensive system of risk and fraud detection techniques to rate the risk of a transaction even before the login process is started. PassMark's Real-Time Risk-Based Decision Engine quickly and silently identifies "good" and "bad" logins, while automating the processing of "uncertain" login attempts.
With the addition of Quova's GeoPoint solution, which identifies the physical location and network characteristics of over 1.4 billion IP addresses, PassMark's Risk Manager can now match these addresses to actual geographic locations in real time. It can even identify when someone attempts to mask their location when they log in or initiate a transaction. By comparing a customer's location at login with their account profile, potentially fraudulent activity can be identified.
"We are working together because both organizations are dedicated to preserving online trust, something we see as essential to the ongoing capability of organizations to conduct business online," said Jeff Scheel, corporate development officer for PassMark. "We chose Quova as a technology partner because it is the gold standard in IP geolocation data and services. Working together PassMark and Quova provide client financial institutions with an even more secure online transaction environment, one that re-instills customer trust."
"Quova and PassMark are industry leaders with a mutual commitment to protecting online banks and e-commerce companies from fraud, and our partnership will enable the delivery of powerful new solutions to the marketplace," said Gary Jackson, COO of Quova. "The combination of Quova's IP Intelligence and PassMark's risk-based, strong authentication system will help online enterprises to meet both toughened federal standards and the explosively growing market demand for the best fraud prevention and customer authentication available."
The PassMark system includes both Two-Factor Two-Way Authentication and real-time, risk-based transaction analysis and scoring to protect the front door (i.e., log-in) and the back door (i.e., financial transaction) of a financial institution's online offerings. Using the system's Policy Engine, each financial institution customer can easily implement their own decisions on what to do with transactions based on their risk scores.
Since the second-factor of authentication uses devices online users already possess, their computers and phones, the result is end-to-end protection for financial institutions and their customers against phishing, spoofing, keyboard logging and other fraudulent attacks, without requiring users to carry any new hardware or install any new software.