Security-specific capabilities and high-fidelity data differentiate Spur from other providers, providing needed IP visibility to reduce the number of fraudulent logins.
The Challenge: Fraudulent Sign-Ups Hiding Behind Proxies and VPNs
In 2024, a bad actor began attacking a technology company’s online platform, attempting to take over accounts or create fraudulent sign-ups to steal contact information and execute a phishing campaign through the platform’s built-in email capabilities.
Using a free IP look-up tool, the company determined that the attacker was leveraging an anonymized VPN provider. However, beyond looking up the IP address, the company could not prevent the attack – they could block a few IP addresses but had a blind spot for traffic that routed through residential proxies and anonymous VPNs.
At first, the company investigated geo location capabilities to determine where the attacker was coming from. They could see the country, but true IPs were still not clear. With better visibility, the company believed they could stop the attacks while enabling the right traffic. Without the right visibility, the company risked reputational damage and restricted legitimate traffic measured by a high false-positive rate, which could impact revenue.
Why Spur: Built from the Ground Up for Security Use Cases
The technology company chose Spur since the solution was built from the ground up for security use cases, not solely geo location like most other tools in the market. Because Spur is a security-first solution, the technology company believed Spur was able to keep up with changes in proxies, providing as much useful information as possible. For all other providers the technology company evaluated, security was an afterthought.
To address the account takeover concern, the company leverages Spur data to identify if the user is attempting to log in from a new IP, new OS, or new geo – attributes that make logins look suspicious. The company then incorporates Spur data into their broader analytics platform, with Spur contributing half of all attributes analyzed to determine valid, non-anonymized traffic. Using the Spur data, the company then trains its ML model to either deny a login or require additional authentication or a password change. To address the free trial abuse and fraudulent sign-up concern, the company correlates Spur IP signals with email, domain, and fingerprint analysis to inform actions that require additional login rules like identity verification.
Return on Investment: Millions Saved Through High-Fidelity IP Visibility
Since implementing its data feeds, Spur has shown to deliver the highest-fidelity data, with the fewest false positives, turning away between ~200 fraudulent logins monthly and increasing accuracy in identifying true positives 7x. This represents millions of dollars in saved revenue and operational costs and an improved customer experience.
Benefits: Full IP Visibility and Stronger Protection for Trial Accounts
With Spur, the technology company now has complete IP visibility into all platform logins and trial account creation processes. For the first time the company is able to detect and block real incidents that went unnoticed before. To the technology company, that means less reputational risk to the business and a better protected trial-to-revenue process.
About Spur
Spur delivers the highest-fidelity IP intelligence available to detect anonymized, proxied, or otherwise obscured internet traffic, empowering you to stop fraud, fake users, and threats. Designed by expert security researchers and engineers, Spur elevated VPN attribution, bot detection, and residential proxy tracking to defend the most mission-critical government and commercial systems in the world.
What differentiates Spur from other providers?
- Breadth of Coverage: Spur delivers more comprehensive detection than anyone else in the market, covering 54 million+ active anonymous IPs, 500+ active VPN services, and 160+ active proxy services.
- Depth of Attributes: Spur provides more than 20 attributes, including geo location, ASN, proxy/VPN status and attribution, device type, connection type, tunnel entry/exit context — not opaque scoring (more than a number).
- Residential Proxy: Spur is the only source that delivers insights into residential proxies, mobile IPs, and botnets — where traditional providers fall short.
- High-Fidelity Data: Spur delivers real-time data that is accurate, fresh, and actionable, focusing on transparency and trust with low false-positive.
- Historical Data Access: Delivers access to historical records dating back to 2020.
- Results in Minutes: Spur delivers fast onboarding, clear documentation, and responsive support for engineers and analysts.
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