Identifying fraud is a critical step in protecting your customers, business, and bottom line. While identifying fraud after the fact is often costly, detecting it at the point of origination can be much more cost-effective. In today’s digital world, merchants must use a multi-layered approach to detect and stop fraudulent activity before it has a chance to impact their customer relationships or financial bottom line. Adding a risk analysis API is an additional layer of protection that can help your business stay ahead of the curve when it comes to fraudulent activity.
A risk assessment API helps prevent data breaches and exposes malicious activities by enabling your system to detect anomalous behavior in real-time. It works by analyzing the environmental data associated with an order to determine if that order is being subjected to fraudulent activity. Once detected, your system can flag the order for further investigation, which allows you to quickly identify suspicious transactions and mitigate the impact on your business.
To implement a risk assessment API, you need to be sure that your system is capable of capturing the relevant environmental data for each order. This can include things like shipping address, IP address, credit card details, and more. You also need to be able to store and process this data at scale. This will be the case if you want to perform an ongoing risk assessment, which can take into account new attacks that may not have been a part of your initial threat model.
In order to implement a risk analysis API, you need to be aware of the security and privacy requirements that you must meet. These requirements are typically set out in your organization’s security and privacy policies and will be influenced by the type of data you are trying to protect, such as credit card information or personal information.
Depending on the types of data you are trying to protect, you might need to implement extra features that can filter out sensitive data from your responses. For example, if you are attempting to protect credit card information, it is essential to avoid returning the date of birth along with the transaction details. Such a response could expose an attacker to additional risks such as social engineering and identity theft.
You should document review dates and repeat your risk assessments whenever a new threat is discovered or you make changes to your system. This will ensure that you can detect and prevent any attacks that might have been missed during the initial review process.
In addition to performing a risk assessment API, you should consider using a third-party tool to detect vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of data breaches. This will allow you to focus on the most important areas of vulnerability for your specific environment. Two common tools used for this are static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST). However, both of these tools can be time-consuming and generate a large number of false-positive security alerts. Triaging and diagnosing each of these alerts can consume valuable development cycles. Furthermore, both SAST and DAST only test the code for known vulnerabilities, leaving your API vulnerable to unknown threats that may arise later on.