Adobe Reduces Fake Account Risk and Improves User Experience with Arkose Labs

Overview

As one of the largest and most diversified software companies in the world, Adobe enables everyone — including students, creative artists, small businesses, government agencies, and the largest global brands — to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences. With a relentless focus on innovation and category leadership of Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Document Cloud, and Adobe Experience Cloud, it gives customers a real competitive advantage to engage their constituents across every digital touch point.

The Business Problem

Many different businesses can be the target of attackers attempting to create fraudulent new email accounts to attempt phishing attacks or to send spam. Attackers leverage this type of attack because if successful, they are generally effective for fraudsters since the company’s domain name is trusted. Thus emails coming from the company’s domain seem more legitimate.

While Adobe has a strong, layered approach to fraud prevention, they saw an opportunity to enhance detection techniques around potential fraudulent accounts. Detecting fake accounts earlier meant stopping bad actors from leveraging their account sign-up systems, harassing other users, and consuming Adobe’s resources.

In the process, the team was looking to enhance the sign-up experience for users while maintaining strong account security measures. A significant portion of traffic coming to the company’s site was challenged with a CAPTCHA, which has been known to impact account sign-up rates. Minimizing unnecessary friction in the user experience is a top priority. Adobe sought a solution that could help eliminate potential spam and abuse, while enhancing user experience, and increasing efficiencies for internal teams.

The Arkose Labs Solution

Adobe chose Arkose Labs’ account security solution as an additional layer of protection to help protect the new account registration flow for email addresses. The platform adapts to real-time signals and changing traffic patterns, which enables it to help determine the intent behind traffic that comes to registration forms. Previously, suspicious traffic was triaged into either trusted or potentially fraudulent. Suspicious traffic was also served an enforcement challenge; these are designed against the latest innovations in machine vision technology and cannot be solved by bots, which can frustrate and slow down human attackers.

Arkose Labs helped the Adobe team gain additional context into session risk, sharing raw risk data in real-time and collaborating on how best to defend against potentially fraudulent account creation. This enhanced Adobe’s existing bot mitigation solution, which offered a static risk score without additional insight into the risk. Arkose Labs continually monitored, reviewed, and fine-tuned detection to adapt to Adobe’s traffic patterns. Custom telltales were also created to label, track, and pressure test suspicious traffic.

The Adobe team also benefited from having 24/7 monitoring from the Arkose Labs Security Operations Center to proactively identify and stop fraudulent activity. The managed threat detection helped Adobe speed up detection time, strengthen defenses against advanced “low and slow” attacks, and block potential attempts quickly.