F5 introduces Shape AI Fraud Engine (SAFE), an AI powered fraud detection engine

By Pavithra R

F5, a multi-cloud application security and delivery company that enables customers to bring extraordinary digital experiences to life has announced that the company has launched Shape AI Fraud Engine (SAFE), a new SaaS solution that eliminates fraudulent online transactions that get past existing fraud tools.

By leveraging Shape’s industry expertise SAFE utilizes a battle-tested AI engine to evaluate each online transaction across a variety of environmental, telemetry, and behavioral signals to accurately understand user intent and block human fraudsters. Application owners face 2 core sources of online fraud against their applications: bots and other forms of malicious or abusive automation, and real humans with bad intent. Through machine learning (ML), Shape distinguishes automated traffic (bots) from humans, as well as malicious traffic from benign, and provides defenses to prevent fraud and abuse, while enhancing user experience. 

Legacy fraud tools rely on weak data signals and static rules, but these tools cannot clearly determine if the user have a good or bad intent, and resort in putting additional burden on good users to prove their legitimacy through various hurdles like multi-factor authentication (MFA) challenges. In contrast, SAFE is a fully managed, AI-powered offering that stops fraudsters in real-time, resulting in up to 90% less friction for known good users. SAFE protects modern and traditional applications, helping organizations accelerate digital efforts and lessen the often-overwhelming workload on fraud teams. It leverages analytic insights gained from defending many attacked applications in the world to identify and stop fraudsters in real-time accurately.

“The need for innovation in fraud prevention becomes more urgent when you factor in the accelerated shift to online channels driven by the current global health situation. We’re seeing fraudsters launch increasingly sophisticated attacks that take advantage of COVID-driven shifts and overall economic distress,” said Sumit Agarwal, Vice President, Analytic Products at F5, and co-founder of Shape.

SAFE helps to overcome various industry challenges in the following ways:

• Stops fraud, faster: SAFE identifies fraudulent transactions along the entire user journey, from new account creation & login to checkout, send payment, and other actions. It uses AI to detect and block malicious intent accurately and has the intelligence to help applications scale and adapt security, performance, and other essential services as needed.
• Reduces friction for real customers: Through a combination of proprietary telemetry and advanced AI, SAFE reduces friction on legitimate activity by safely removing MFA challenges for known good users.
• Increases fraud teams effectiveness: It is delivered as a fully managed service, with ongoing tuning done by Shape fraud experts. It also reduces the amount of time and resources fraud teams have to expend on manual investigations.

Established since 1996, F5 is an American company that specializes in application services and application delivery networking. It’s portfolio of automation, security, performance, and insight capabilities empower customers to create, secure, and operate adaptive applications that increase revenue, reduce costs, improve operations, and better protect users.