Customers are the lifeblood of every business. They are the ones who can make or break the company because without the customers there is also not going to be a company for long. You could have the best new product on the market, but if you don’t have customers that are interested in that product then it doesn’t matter how amazing it is. Nobody will ever find out about the benefits your product or company could’ve had.
This is why marketing has always been a crucial part of any business strategy. It was a way of reaching out to your customers, introducing them to your product and grabbing their interest and attention. Consumers have so many options and access to so many different goods and services that it is getting harder and harder for businesses to compete on today’s market.
While the businesses and organisations are constantly investing into their marketing departments in hopes to get better insight into their customer, to discover what makes them tick, what do they want and how do they want it, they are forgetting about another important aspect of business strategy and that is cyber security. While the truth is that businesses want to attract as many customers as they can, it is also the truth that some of those customers don’t have honorable intentions. Luckily some of the tools you are using for marketing purposes can also be used in cyber security.
Wonder how? Stay with us and discover how getting insights into any customer can help you protect your business from cyber threats.
Why does my business need insights on customers?
We live in an age of information and it is a crucial element in every part of your business. Everytime the customers are going online they leave a trail of data which helps you discover who your customers are and what they want. This can be used to improve your business by introducing targeted marketing, adapting to customer wishes and producing better products but most importantly to protect your customers and your business from cyber threats.
How to find detailed insights on your customer?
The best tool you can use to find detailed insights on your customer and protect your business is called device fingerprinting. Device fingerprinting is a process of using a user’s device and its specific and unique configuration to identify a device. It uses different software and hardware variables to create a unique fingerprint for each user. Some of these variables could be details about Operating System (OS), IP address, time, language or location settings, browser plugins, Flash data, HTTP request headers and much more.
The more data is collected, it is easier to create a unique fingerprint for each user and identify if they are a true customer or a fraudster. Of course some of the variables will be the same for various users, but that is exactly the reason why so much data is collected, to be able to differentiate between them. Even if the users have the same device or operating system, the other variables like browser, language setting or time zone will show their differences.
How to use Device Fingerprinting to reduce fraud?
Cyber security tools can be extremely useful when it comes to stopping account takeover or identity theft which are one of the most common types of cyber threat in the e-commerce and financial sector. By creating a unique fingerprint for each user you can confirm more easily if the user is legitimate or a fraudster. You will be able to notice any difference the moment they happen like a user accessing the system from a suspicious location or time zone, if the IP address changed or any other difference in the variables.
For example, the financial sector has already been using device fingerprinting to protect themselves from cyber attack by confirming if the user trying to access the account has the same fingerprint as they did during the previous logins. If there is a change in the fingerprint, an additional level of security is implemented. Depending on the rules implemented in the cyber security protocol, that user can either be blocked or asked to confirm their identity with multi-level verification.
Implementing device fingerprinting into your cyber security protocol is crucial, but it can protect you from everything. In order to take proactive steps to protect your business, you need to start educating yourself about cybersecurity and be more aware of the risks you are facing and what you can do to defend against them.
