Financial Fraud: Threatening Our American Way of Using Money
Fortanix and FiVerity Can Help Prevent This Type of Fraud
Guest blog post by Patrick Conte
Fortanix has been at the forefront of cyber security over the past 5 years, focusing heavily on the one part of the security landscape that, when all else fails, has to work – protecting critical data via encryption. This includes company data about internal systems and accounts, as well as customer and supply chain partner data. Relationships and financial information that is important for all parties to keep safe. However, in today’s world there is data that is even more important to keep safe – individual data such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or Personal Health Information (PHI). This information is sent everywhere on the web, but must be kept secure and as importantly, private. In this way, data protection and data privacy go hand in hand.
Fortanix’s Data Security Manager (DSM) is the one platform on the market that can encrypt critical data at rest, in motion, and in use. This end-to-end cyber security solution has been in use in banking, capital markets, healthcare and life sciences and a number of other vertical markets. It’s time for the current generation of fintechs and institutions to get on board to protect the personal data and wealth that customers entrust to them.
How is our American way of using money at risk? Fraudsters are creating synthetic versions of us for the purposes of opening up credit card accounts, loan applications, even insurance and medical claims. Identity theft costs us all close to a TRILLION dollars a year, which we have to pay for one way or another. And if you’ve been the victim of identify fraud you know that is not an abstract figure any more, as your life can get turned upside down. A lot of that Trillion Dollars comes when synthetic ID’s are used to get new cards or open up new credit accounts, run them up and then disappear.
How to fight this? The bad guys are using Artificial Intelligence to find IDs they can steal or to hijack known accounts. So the good guys have to use AI to combat these techniques. Fortanix, the leader in Confidential AI, which is based on secure enclave technology developed by Intel® in the form of their chip level technology SGX, can help protect and keep PII and PHI private via encrypting the data at rest, in motion and importantly in use. This is critical as a lot of PII needs to be brought together to have AI work on the combined data set, in order to detect and prevent digital fraud.
Fortanix is partnering with FiVerity, experts in fighting digital fraud, who have built an AI based solution for just this purpose. FiVerity’s solution is easy to set up and use, and can be done so continuously. But to make it work safely, the AI and the data need to be in the Confidential Computing secure enclave, i.e. encrypted in use. Fortanix Confidential AI allows the algorithm, model and data to come together in the enclave, to produce a secure result to the fraud challenge. This protects the data, the privacy of the individuals, and the AI software itself. The bad guys can not get to it if it is in the SGX based enclave, even if they were to gain access to the physical server, the admin’s credentials or other kinds of social information used in attacks. So the data moves safely from the source institution, goes into the enclave along with FiVerity’s AI, and what comes out helps banks, card issuers and governments to detect and prevent the big dollar fraud from happening.
This combined solution is available today. We are very excited to work with FiVerity to bring it to market and proud to be part of the solution to such a dangerous and pervasive financial and social problem. Bad guys will have to go somewhere else to try their luck, as Confidential Computing will make financial services increasingly harder to penetrate!