What is the Edge and Why is it a New Home for Fraud Prevention?

In a digital world that prioritises access, low friction and speed, edge computing opens up a new landscape of opportunity.

Edge computing is essentially a way of geographically distributing both computation and data storage closer to the users and their devices. Closer geographical locations equal faster distribution and less latency, as well as improved security and privacy as personal data doesn’t travel as far, if at all.

The best analogy we’ve found to bring this concept to life is: why would you stream a Netflix show from a US data center when you are watching it from the UK? It makes more sense to access a UK instance of Netflix so that data and content didn’t need to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

It’s essentially a way of having the computing power and advantages of an on-premise data center, geographically replicated closer to end users and their devices.

Why Should the Security and Fraud Prevention Industry Care about Edge Computing?

One of the challenges that the security and fraud prevention industry has faced in the last decade, is how to balance the often-competing demands of accessibility and low friction access, with a robust, secure and adaptable approach to security and fraud prevention. The industry needs solutions that can adapt and react quicker, but without compromising the security of user data.

This is where edge computing represents an incredibly exciting opportunity. If fraud prevention solutions can harness the potential of edge networks, they could achieve the holy grail of full customer journey visibility, microsecond latency, and absolute privacy of user data.

This is where Content Delivery Networks come in. A Content Delivery Network, or CDN for short, is an edge-based geographically distributed network of servers and data centers that are used by most digital businesses to deliver their web content to end users. Why? Because they speed up load times,
improve user experience, and improve security by keeping customer data closer to their devices, and where they are located.

This edge-based technology represents the perfect new home for online fraud detection, provided it allows all the same profiling and decisioning capabilities that traditional API solutions do. Well it turns out, it can do that, and a whole lot more, via a piece of technology called edge workers.

The Edge, Its not just about speed and Security?

Edge Workers are a serverless computing platform that allows developers to write and deploy code to networks of servers around the world. Code is executed closer to the end-user, resulting in faster response times and reduced latency.

By running code at the edge, Edge Workers can analyze incoming traffic in real-time and identify both trusted and risky behavior. For instance, they can identify bots that are attempting to use stolen credentials to log into an account by monitoring user behavior patterns such as IP addresses, login attempts, and navigation paths. Or they can identify trusted users that are displaying normal patterns of behavior but are perhaps getting caught by overzealous blanket authentication checks.

Edge Workers can also prevent attacks such as credential stuffing, where attackers use automated bots to try multiple combinations of usernames and passwords until they find a match.

With Edge Workers, developers can create custom rules and logic that can identify different patterns of user behavior, thereby preventing fraud while reducing unnecessary friction, and protecting users’ data.

Moreover, Edge Workers can monitor traffic patterns and identify potential threats, such as spikes in traffic from a particular geographic region or a sudden increase in requests for a specific API endpoint.

This information can be used to create custom rules that block suspicious traffic or redirect it to a particular step-up challenge, such as Captcha, preventing bots from accessing the site.

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