Key Results
Immediate reduction in the volume of unknown (empty) session traffic
Hundreds of thousands of dollars saved in downstream fraud detection costs
Online bank accounts compromised by automated attacks virtually eliminated
Summary
One of the largest and most established U.S. financial institutions faced two bot-related threats: significant bot attacks compromising consumer accounts and an increasing volume of unknown sessions.
The account takeover (ATO) attacks compromising accounts were vast and deteriorated trust between customers and the bank. Despite using a layered security approach with Akamai, LexisNexis® ThreatMetrix and other solution providers, the threats persisted. After deploying Arkose Bot Manager at the login flow, the bot-based ATO attacks were accurately detected and stopped, and consumer confidence was restored.
The bank also suffered from increasing unknown session rates. The costs associated with solution resources and FTEs were skyrocketing. Once Arkose Bot Manager was implemented between Akamai and ThreatMetrix, the bank saved hundreds of thousands of dollars on downstream costs, justifying the investment in Arkose Labs and proving the power of a defense-in-depth cybersecurity stack.
What is an Unknown Session?
Typically, a company’s device vendor identifies and/or classifies a session as “unknown” when its session ID result is blank, meaning that it contains no profile information or details by which it can be determined to be good or bad traffic. Unknown sessions (also referred to as “empty sessions”) occur when device profiling has failed on a given transaction, making this type of traffic a material risk to any enterprise that encounters it.
The Business Problem
The bank had a layered cybersecurity solution stack in place. It included Akamai CDN and Bot Manager to stop DDOS attacks and bots out at the edge, and the LexisNexis Risk Solutions product ThreatMetrix to analyze digital identities and assess and decision behavioral intelligence to stop online fraud. Each solution in the stack was developed to serve fundamentally different purposes, and each is a leader in its specific area of strength and expertise.
Regardless, massive amounts of malicious bot traffic were still slipping through the bank’s layered security tech stack.
The bank continued to experience an escalation of advanced bot attacks targeting its online banking platform, manifesting as account takeovers and appearing as unknown sessions. The bank was eager to quickly understand and resolve both issues because not only did the account takeover attacks target its customers’ personal and financial information, but it was also paying its device vendor a premium to attempt to profile the unknown sessions — all to no avail. These expenses drove zero value to the bank, so it needed a way to detect and mitigate online attacks with greater efficiency and accuracy.
The Arkose Labs Solution
To solve the issues, the bank selected Arkose Bot Manager, which is dynamic and purpose built with the most advanced technology to detect and mitigate sophisticated bot attacks and human fraud farm threats and abuse. Monitoring more than 125+ risk signals, the platform uses progressive device and behavior fingerprinting technologies that enable it to accurately detect and immediately stop attack types like account takeover, credential stuffing, fake account creation, man-in-the-middle phishing threats, etc. before they make impact. By continuously analyzing traffic patterns and device behavior, Arkose Bot Manager identifies anomalies indicative of automated threats and manual fraud farm attack attempts. Plus, it includes an adaptive challenge-response suite to determine the authenticity of a user interaction. The platform was a welcome additive to the bank’s other fraud prevention measures, classifying and triaging traffic based on risk profile.
Arkose Bot Manager was deployed at the “top of the funnel” stages, like account sign-ins and sign-ups, and was integrated into the middle of the bank’s technology stack, bridging the online fraud solutions of Akamai and ThreatMetrix. This strategic positioning allowed Arkose Bot Manager to address the deficiencies in the other solutions and significantly reduced noise in downstream traffic, thereby improving data fidelity for the other solutions.
Arkose Bot Manager’s expertise was pivotal in stopping ATO attacks and eliminating confusing unknown sessions from the bank’s login flow, which helped it avoid costly risk analysis and decision-making on irrelevant, junk data.
Arkose Labs provides low/no-code integration with CDNs and CIAM solutions
Demonstrated Results
Using Arkose Bot Manager, the bank saw a steep drop off of bot attacks. It detected and stopped ATO attacks and ensured genuine consumers had delightful digital banking experiences. It also mitigated unknown sessions much earlier in the workflow resulting in the bank saving on downstream costs.
Today the bank stops attacks faster and keeps its anti-fraud costs lower than before it deployed Arkose Bot Manager. With junk data cleared from the flow, the bank can make precise and accurate decisions based on its traffic, without the noise and expense of many unknown sessions to sift through. This illustrates the importance of a defense-in-depth approach to online fraud detection and mitigation.
A single silver bullet to stop bad actors doesn’t exist. But a “better together” strategic mindset combining solutions like Arkose Bot Manager, Akamai, ThreatMetrix, or other similar solutions can keep operational costs down and cybercriminals out – while ultimately maintaining consumer trust and creating seamless experiences for genuine users.
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