
A world with invisible security

What is NuDetect?
NuDetect by NuData Security, a Mastercard® company uses behavioral analytics and passive biometrics to identify good (digital) users in real-time with confidence, without adding friction. It does so by assessing hundreds of devices, locations, passive biometric and behavioral signals against past user behavior and known behaviors.
NuDetect takes a multi-layered approach to understand a user’s digital interactions, and provide a highly accurate real-time score for best-in-class behavioral validation — helping merchants optimize the user experience.
Success Story
Stopping evolving attacks – When attacks evolve every 24 hours.
What challenges does NuDetect help merchants to address?
NuDetect can help merchants address the following needs:
- Account Takeover Detection: Fraudsters can use stolen credentials to take over accounts. By changing account details and delivery addresses, they can steal and transfer funds, make high-value purchases, or steal rewards and services. In many cases, high-value accounts are targeted. NuDetect can help identify legitimate users during login and authentication.
- Intelligent Automation Detection: Fraudsters can scale their attacks and evade detection by traditional merchant fraud tools by using machine-driven automation, repetitive scripting, malware, and more. NuDetect can identify and eliminate bad automation in real-time during account opening, login, rewards, or balance checks.
- Device and Connection Intelligence: Fraudsters can easily spoof or obfuscate a device or connection to hide their identity. NuDetect analyzes the user’s device, connection and location to understand how the user is connecting to the digital environment and continues to identify trusted devices and connections each time the user returns.
What are the benefits for merchants?
NuDetect can help merchants improve brand loyalty and revenue while reducing costs.
- Increased Loyalty: Improved user verification helps to ensure a positive and consistent consumer experience reinforcing loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value.
- Improved Risk Management: Greater visibility into users’ behavior combined with passive biometrics creates stronger validation, reducing human and automated attacks, account takeover and behavioral anomalies.
- Reduced Costs and Improved Revenue: Moving valid customers through the flow faster and more efficiently will drive revenue, while ensuring risky and anomalous events are quickly detected and remediated.
For which brands and transactions is it available?
NuDetect is brand-agnostic and available for all payment brands and card products. NuDetect is not payment centric and can be used at multiple touchpoints throughout the digital consumer journey, including:
- Login (e.g., authorization, forgotten password, forgotten username, etc.)
- Account Creation/Credit Application
- Transaction
- Point Redemption
- Account Modification
- Gift Card Balance Check
- Funds Transfer
How does it work?
NuDetect assesses how consumers interact with their digital devices to drive verification accuracy without adding friction—analyzing billions of data points and using machine learning techniques to evaluate common digital user behaviors and interactions such as:
- Pressure: How much pressure do they apply when touching their device screen?
- Cadence: How fast do they swipe and type on the device screen?
- Position: How do they hold their device when they interact with it?
- Device and Connection: How are they connecting to the environment?
- Expected behavior: Is their behavior consistent with previous behavior?
NuDetect collects hundreds of data points and evaluates the behavioral interactions for deviation of expected behavior, automated behavior, spoofing, malware interception/manipulation and other anomalies.
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- Device, Connection, and Location Identification: Information such as device type and geolocation are used to create a “Device ID” that can be leveraged to detect spoofing or device masking.
- Passive (Invisible) Biometric Validation: Session behavior (i.e., how a user inputs into the device such as typing speed, keystroke deviations, etc.) is measured to identify human vs. non-human behavior as well as to verify the user from impersonating fraudsters.
- Behavioral Analytics: User behavior is continually measured against past behavior to detect abnormalities on both an individual and total population basis.
- Real-Time Trust Consortium: Billions of data points are aggregated, anonymized and matched against known patterns of behavioral interactions from across the network.
As a result, NuDetect provides merchants with a real-time behavioral validation score, device ID and device fingerprint, and behavioral signals that identify the level of risk in the consumer’s behavioral interaction.
How does NuDetect work with a merchant’s other security tools and processes?
NuDetect collects device, behavioral and biometric data to provide merchants with a risk score that is verified in real-time—using continual assessment to identify potentially risky behavior or anomalies. Merchants can use this information to determine if they need to fully verify a consumer’s identity or inform other solutions and rules-based systems—which can prompt other actions or amend the characteristics of the session being monitored.
Does NuDetect replace the need to fully verify a consumer’s identity in digital environments?
No. NuDetect provides an indication of confidence in a consumer’s authenticity. While it may help customers determine if they want to fully authenticate consumers, NuDetect is intended to complement, not replace, verification tools or other contextual/physiological verification methods to authenticate the consumer’s identity.
Do merchants participating in NuDetect receive a liability shift benefit?
Not at this time. There is currently no liability shift benefit to participating merchants.
How does NuDetect work with other Mastercard fraud detection products?
Securing all payments today and tomorrow remains a top priority for Mastercard. The addition of NuDetect builds upon Mastercard’s layered security strategy to safeguard every transaction across the globe. The combination of session and behavioral biometric information provides even richer context around potential cyber and device-specific threats, enabling greater trust and peace of mind. NuDetect complements other Mastercard security products, such as Mastercard Assurance IQ™ and Mastercard Identity Check™, to help merchants enhance their consumer verification and fraud detection capabilities—providing them with actionable insights they have not received before.
What are the high-level implementation considerations (e.g., coding, system changes, etc.)?
NuDetect is browser-independent and easily integrates into customer web or mobile applications (i.e., iOS, Android, etc.) to collect and evaluate interaction data at multiple touch points throughout the digital consumer journey.
NuDetect is a SaaS, cloud-hosted, private cloud or on-premise solution integrated using JavaScript (JS) in the web browser, SDK on mobile devices, and a client library or restful API on the web server. The SDK, JS and client library collects and provides relevant data points for analysis. This integration strategy allows us to quickly deploy across a range of solutions while offering easy maintenance and feature upgrades for customers.
Assessment scoring and information from NuDetect is passed back to the customer in real-time, so clients can immediately respond to varied levels of risk. As a user interacts with the various flows within the environment, data is collected and passed to the NuDetect Machine Learning Engine in real-time to be analyzed with the result of returning Scoring, Threat, and Behavioral Intelligence that can be incorporated into a merchants’ risk model.
- As a web page loads, a NuDetect JavaScript tag is included in the Customer Application view.
- When a web page is submitted, a server-to-server API call is made to push application data to the NuDetect platform and optionally request a real-time risk score.
How does NuDetect compare to competitive offerings?
NuDetect provides an unmatched view of the consumer by applying the knowledge and power of four layers of intelligence that continuously verify consumers in real-time—helping to lower risk and eliminate unnecessary friction. While other competitors may leverage some of these capabilities, only NuDetect provides all four of the following:
- Device, location and connection analytics using enhanced Device ID, IP and rules engine.
- Passive behavioral biometrics and monitoring for both eCommerce and mCommerce channels.
- Behavioral analytics.
- Real-time entity linking in a cloud consortium: aggregated and anonymized behavioral cloud linking intelligence using machine learning techniques, leveraging over 650 billion behavioral events analyzed annually.
In which markets is it available?
NuDetect is available in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, U.S., U.K., and other selected European markets. For current market availability, please contact your regional Mastercard representative.
What is the pricing?
The NuDetect pricing structure includes a per transaction or account fee tiered based upon volumes. Fees vary by region. Please refer to the Mastercard Consolidated Billing Manual for pricing details.
For more information on NuDetect, please contact your business development at bizdev@nudatasecurity.com