Account Takeover API

Overview

Account takeover (ATO) is when a fraudster gains control of an account that belongs to a genuine customer. Fraudsters can then make unauthorised transactions, sell the compromised accounts on and/or scrape personal information out of the account which can be sold.

Phishing, spyware and malware can all be used to commit more sophisticated ATO attacks. However, credential stuffing is the most common tactic used to launch ATO attacks.

Credential stuffing uses stolen username and password combinations to automate login requests in order to gain access to user accounts. Estimates on the average success rate of credential stuffing attacks range from 0.1-2% with a peak of 8% quoted by some sources.

Following a breach, stolen credentials are purchased on the darkweb and shared via cracking forums. Data breaches are therefore a major contributing factor to increasing levels of ATO attacks. Combined with high levels of password reuse, this is especially concerning.

Credential stuffing can be scripted by more skilled fraudsters. However, automated tools like Sentry MBA make credential stuffing very easy for anyone to commit. This means there is a range of actors involved in committing ATO; from sophisticated hackers through to teenagers looking to order a ‘free’ pizza.

ATO attacks have significant consequences for merchants. It’s not just the cost of replacing goods or refunding payments - it’s also the time spent by support teams dealing with angry customers and other teams tackling the legal and operational fallout. In addition, there is often significant reputational damage incurred.

How Ravelin Combats Account Takeover

Taking into account the nature of ATO, Ravelin have introduced a number of different ways to combat the issue.

Breached Credentials

Credential stuffing relies on a list of username and password combinations. In order to mitigate against this, we maintain a breached credentials database. Calls can be made to the database either via the v3/login event at login or via /v2/lookup/credentials/check during registration or password change to verify if we’ve seen the credentials in the wild. Though we cannot guarantee that every breached credential will be in our database, this can go a long way to preventing ATO. You can also search for and view users that have logged in with credentials that appear in our database - providing additional context during investigations.

Rate limits

We have added customisable rate limits at login around device, username and IP. Thresholds can be set for this depending on your specific operational requirements. Rate limits are useful for tackling high volume attacks.

In addition, we check for things we know can indicate that a user is a fraudster like proxies and TOR.

Rules

We can set ATO specific rules around device, username, IP and velocity. For example, if the same device tries to access X accounts within a set time frame. Rules are especially useful for tackling ‘low and slow’ volume attacks.

Collecting and surfacing login activity data

By leveraging data collected via v3/login event, we provide oversight of login activity within our dashboard. Login activity reporting is available to explore via our Analytics tool, making it easier to spot anomalies in ‘normal’ login activity across your customer base. In addition, you can interact with login data via a filterable login list and drill down to view login information for a specific customer on their customer profile.

Monitoring Account Changes

Account changes can be used as an important signal for ATO. For example, if a new device or location is detected at login or if there is a change made to account details like email or delivery address. We can also send you information on changes to account details so you can verify the change was legitimately made by the customer.

Login Event

The point of login is a critical step in detecting account takeover. We want to prevent the malicious actor from being able to log in just like we want to prevent the fraudster from completing an order.

POST /v3/login?score=true

This is the endpoint used to tell Ravelin about every login attempt, both successful and unsuccessful. Unsuccessful logins can be important signals for an ATO attack. It will provide an ATO recommendation response if asked for via the query parameter score=true. Otherwise it will simply record the data without further processing.

{
    "timestamp": 1512828988826,
    "login": {
        "customerId": "abc-123-ZYZ",
        "loginId": "abc-123-ZYZ",
        "success": false,
        "username": "example_username",
        "authenticationMechanism": {
            "password": {
                "passwordHashed": "2cf24dba5fb0a30e26e83b2ac5b9e29e1b161e5c1fa7425e73043362938b9824",
                "success": false,
                "failureReason": "BAD_PASSWORD"
            },
            "social": {
                "success": false,
                "failureReason": "SOCIAL_FAILURE",
                "socialProvider": "google"
            },
            "oneTimeCode": {
                "success": false,
                "failureReason": "INVALID_CODE"
            },
            "u2f": {
                "failureReason": "INVALID_KEY",
                "success": false
            },
            "rsaKey": {
                "success": false,
                "failureReason": "INVALID_KEY"
            },
            "smsCode": {
                "phoneNumber": "+16045555555",
                "success": false,
                "failureReason": "INVALID_CODE"
            },
            "magiclink": {
                "transport": "email",
                "email": "jsmith123@example.com",
                "success": false,
                "failureReason": "INVALID_LINK"
            },
            "recaptcha": {
                "success": false,
                "failureReason": "FAILED_TEST"
            }
        },
        "app": {
            "name": "Our App Lite",
            "platform": "web",
            "domain": "us.brand.com"
        },
        "custom": {
            "additionalProp1": {},
            "additionalProp2": {},
            "additionalProp3": {}
        }
    },
    "device": {
        "deviceId": "string",
        "ipAddress": "81.152.92.84",
        "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.100 Safari/537.36",
        "model": "Pixel XL",
        "os": "android",
        "type": "phone",
        "location": {
            "country": "GBR",
            "postalCode": "E1 1AA",
            "latitude": 51.503252,
            "longitude": -0.127899,
            "addresseeName": "John Smith",
            "street1": "123 fake st.",
            "street2": "floor 4, flat 48",
            "neighbourhood": "Hackney",
            "zone": "1",
            "city": "London",
            "region": "California",
            "poBoxNumber": "1234"
        }
    },
    "location": {
        "country": "GBR",
        "postalCode": "E1 1AA",
        "latitude": 51.503252,
        "longitude": -0.127899,
        "addresseeName": "John Smith",
        "street1": "123 fake st.",
        "street2": "floor 4, flat 48",
        "neighbourhood": "Hackney",
        "zone": "1",
        "city": "London",
        "region": "California",
        "poBoxNumber": "1234"
    }
}

Above is the full login request object. This is similar to our /v2/login endpoint but with additional information regarding the authentication attempt. This request is expected to be sent after all successful and unsuccessful logins from your backend system.

Login

Device

While Device is not a required field on the login event, it is highly recommended as it is a vital signal to account breaches. The most important Device fields are deviceId and ipAddress. deviceId can be generated using our JavaScript library. Details about that can be found in the device fingerprinting section. Any other fields can be very useful but are not strictly necessary. For more details about device tracking please see our device API and the Guide.

Location

Location is optional as we are aware you will not typically have a location at login time. If you do have location as part of your flow this can be very useful to localise ongoing or repeat attackers. Please see here for details about the location object: Location API

Responses

Success

You can see an example of a successful response from the /v3/login endpoint below. This response is identical to other responses given by the Ravelin platform for payment fraud endpoints. Note that we do provide payment fraud scores at login time as well. The Payment fraud and ATO responses are both included. Ensure you use the correct action when dealing with ATO vs. Payment Fraud.

Example response:

{
    "checks": {
      "additionalProp1": {
        "action": "string"
      },
      "additionalProp2": {
        "action": "string"
      },
      "additionalProp3": {
        "action": "string"
      }
    },
    "credentialStatus": {
      "passwordBreached": true,
      "usernameBreached": true
    },
    "data": {
      "action": "string",
      "ato": {
        "action": "string",
        "rules": {
          "passiveAction": "string",
          "triggered": [
            {
              "action": "string",
              "description": "string",
              "state": "string",
              "triggered": true
            }
          ]
        }
      },
      "cachedScore": true,
      "comment": "string",
      "connect": {
        "fraudulent": true
      },
      "customerId": "string",
      "effectiveTime": "string",
      "lookup": {
        "lookupAction": "string",
        "lookupResult": {
          "email": {
            "address": "string",
            "hasChargebacks": true,
            "reviewedAsFraudster": true
          },
          "hasChargebacks": true,
          "industry": "string",
          "ipAddress": {
            "address": "string",
            "fromTime": 0,
            "hasChargebacks": true,
            "reviewedAsFraudster": true,
            "toTime": 0
          },
          "reviewedAsFraudster": true,
          "telephone": {
            "hasChargebacks": true,
            "number": "string",
            "reviewedAsFraudster": true
          }
        }
      },
      "market": {
        "city": "string",
        "country": "string",
        "region": "string"
      },
      "rules": {
        "passiveAction": "string",
        "triggered": [
          {
            "action": "string",
            "description": "string",
            "state": "string",
            "triggered": true
          }
        ]
      },
      "score": 0,
      "scoreId": "string",
      "source": "string",
      "thresholds": {
        "prevent": 0,
        "review": 0
      },
      "warnings": [
        {
          "class": "string",
          "help": "string",
          "msg": "string",
          "state": "string"
        }
      ]
    },
    "message": "string",
    "status": 0,
    "success": "string",
    "timestamp": "string",
    "traceId": "string",
    "warnings": [
      {
        "docs": "string",
        "id": 0,
        "message": "string"
      }
    ]
  }

Failure

You can see an example of a failed response from the /v3/login endpoint below. A failure response will indicate why the failure happened and will try to direct you to relevant documentation.

{
    "docs": "string",
    "errors": [
      {
        "Docs": "string",
        "Error": "string",
        "Path": "string"
      }
    ],
    "message": "string",
    "retryable": true,
    "status": 0,
    "success": "string",
    "timestamp": "string",
    "traceId": "string"
  }

Action

Using the information supplied to Ravelin, logins and other events are categorised in one of three buckets: PERMIT WARN BLOCK

This information is sent in the response body to scored POST requests (with ?score=true) as defined above.

Requesting an action

Events sent to Ravelin using POST requests get an empty response body by default. The information is stored in our system and no further action is taken during the request. To force an immediate evaluation based on the information received up to and including an event add the ?score=true query parameter.

This will do two things:

1. Process the event payload
2. Force immediate recalculation of the action and return it

The score will be calculated based on the information in this event, and in all events previously received and met with a 200 OK status.

Suggested handling

The ?score=true query parameter is available on every event endpoint. This includes both ATO and Payment Fraud related endpoints. Specify it when you want to make a decision regarding a login attempt.

The most important field in the payload is action under the ATO object:

Other fields are provided for analytic and debugging purposes.

Credentials Check

POST /v2/lookup/credentials/check

Ravelin maintains an up to date list of breached credentials that can be found in the public domain. At login, you can view whether the login attempt was using breached credentials by looking at the credentialStatus object within the /v3/login response.

You can use the database to check if a user is attempting to register a new account, or update an existing one, with credentials that have been seen in the wild via our v2/lookup/credentials/check endpoint. The below request is expected to be sent at password creation or update. The response will tell you if the username and/or password is found in our breached credential database.

Request

Passwords are extremely sensitive, so please do not send us plaintext passwords. Instead, please hash the password with SHA256 and HEX encode it before sending it. We do not store the hashed password, and discard it immediately after processing your request.

{
    "username": "string",   
    "passwordHash": "string"
}

Response

{
    "usernameBreached": true,
    "passwordBreached": true
}

There are three distinct flows where we check if a users credentials have been breached. For each flow, you may want to take a different action. Below we have outlined what we suggest for each flow.

Authentication

While your backend is processing a login request, you can call our v3/login endpoint. Our response will indicate within the credential status object whether or not the username and password appear in Ravelin’s breached credential database.

...
"credentialStatus": {
    "usernameBreached": false,
    "passwordBreached": false
  },
...

...
"credentialStatus": {
    "usernameBreached": true,
    "passwordBreached": false
  },
...

...
"credentialStatus": {
    "usernameBreached": true,
    "passwordBreached": true
  },
...

Registration

At registration, you can call our v2/lookup/credentials/check endpoint. We will return the responses outlined below.

...
"credentialStatus": {
    "usernameBreached": false,
    "passwordBreached": false
  },
...

...
"credentialStatus": {
    "usernameBreached": true,
    "passwordBreached": false
  },
...

...
"credentialStatus": {
    "usernameBreached": true,
    "passwordBreached": true
  },
...

Password Updates

During an account update (e.g. forgot password, password change), you can call our v2/lookup/credentials/check endpoint. We will return the responses outlined below.

...
"credentialStatus": {
    "usernameBreached": false,
    "passwordBreached": false
  },
...

...
"credentialStatus": {
    "usernameBreached": true,
    "passwordBreached": false
  },
...

...
"credentialStatus": {
    "usernameBreached": true,
    "passwordBreached": true
  },
...

Account Changes

When a customer makes changes to their account those details should be sent to Ravelin. This can be done via the core API. We will take these updates as signals to aid in account takeover detection. Further we are able to return these detected changes as well as the previous value to you in the response of the request. This includes a URL that can be used to verify that the customer was indeed the one to make those changes. This is typically done by sending an email to the customer asking if they recognise the new details.

Response

The response object will be inside the typical scoring response. As an example, this is the response received when a customer changes their email address on a new device:

{
  ...
  "customerChanges": [
  {
    "changeId": "abc-123-XYZ",
    "customerId": "customer1",
    "changeType": "EMAIL",
    "newValue": { 
      "email":{
        "email": "newEmail@example.com",
        "timestamp": "2019-02-11T15:23:05.468789646Z"
      }
    },        
    "previousValue": { 
      "email":{
        "email": "oldEmail@example.com",
        "timestamp": "2018-10-11T17:12:06.584698542Z"
      }
    },
    "timestamp": "2019-02-11T15:23:06.741447896Z",
    "verificationURL": "https://api.ravelin.com/v2/change/verify?id=Y2xpZW50SWTCp2N1c3RvbWVySWTCp2NoYW5nZUlk"
  },
  {
    "changeId": "XYZ-abc-123",
    "customerId": "customer1",
    "changeType": "DEVICE",
    "newValue": { 
      "device":{
        "deviceId": "new-device-id",
        "deviceType": "phone",
        "deviceManufacturer": "google",
        "deviceModel": "Pixel XL",
        "deviceOS": "android",
        "ipAddress": "10.11.12.13",
        "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.100 Safari/537.36",
        "timestamp": "2019-02-11T15:23:05.468789646Z"
      }
    },        
    "previousValue": { 
      "device":{
        "deviceId": "old-device-id",
        "deviceType": "phone",
        "deviceManufacturer": "apple",
        "deviceModel": "iPhone X",
        "deviceOS": "iOS",
        "ipAddress": "10.11.12.13",
        "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.100 Safari/537.36",
        "timestamp": "2018-11-03T17:43:05.468789646Z"
      }
    },
    "timestamp": "2019-02-11T15:23:06.741447896Z",
    "verificationURL": "https://api.ravelin.com/v2/change/verify?id=X48IkdxpZW50SWTCp2N1c3RvbWVySWTCp2NoYW5nZUlk"
  }
]
  ...
}

Verification URL

If you chose to verify that the changes were legitimate by requesting confirmation from the user, it is important to use the URL we provide as we can use this data to improve how we detect account takeover.

We recommend that you email the previously listed email for confirmation if the email address has been updated as part of the account changes.

The verification URL is given in the change response. Making a GET request on this URL will inform the ravelin system of updates to the verification status. There are a number of query parameters that may be used. They are as follows:

These query parameters may be added to the end of the URL. This is what a complete request may look like:

GET https://api.ravelin.com/v2/change/verify?id=Y2xpZW50SWTCp2N1c3RvbWVySWTCp2NoYW5nZUlk
&verified=true
&all=true
&r=https://www.ravelin.com

The highlighted parameters are examples of what would be added by you. When the r query parameter is set, the response will contain a 303 status with the contents of the r query parameter in the Location header. This will redirect the browser to that URL. This allows you to host a static result page on your domain thanking the user for this verification while still only needing to put this link into an email.

Verification Patterns

The verification process requires more complexity than most aspects of the Ravelin integration. This includes emailing customers and, optionally, providing an API within your backend in which the customers are able to verify changes. We recommend contacting Ravelin to discuss your options.

Suggestion #1 (Recommended)

To get the most out of change verification, you need to know the result of the verification within your own backend. This allows you to take immediate further action as well as reassuring customers as the link in the email will be within your domain. To do this we recommend you set up an endpoint in your system which accepts the verification request from the email. You can then use the VerificationURL we provide to forward that response to us.

If the customer clicks on the link indicating they don’t recognise a change, we recommend you reset the customers password, locking them (and any intruder) out of the account. At the same time, send them a password reset email so they can recover the account. We suggest you verify if the email associated with the customer account has been changed recently. If the email has been changed, we advise you send any password reset information to the previously used email. Then the customer can be redirected to a page informing them of what has happened and the next steps that they should take to recover the account

If the verification comes back as a true change, no further action against the customer account is required. You can forward them to a page thanking them for the feedback.

In both cases the result of the verification must be forwarded to us.

Suggestion #2

If your team can not prioritise the construction of a backend API, you can embed the links we provide directly into the email. This will allow us to know about verification status without the need for a backend api on your part.

That said, you will have to construct a landing page for both the yes and no verification requests that Ravelin can redirect the user to. These can be simple static pages that must be hosted on your domain.

You should add a redirect on to the links for both verifying yes and no with the appropriate page.

The page indicating an unrecognised change should include information on resetting their password and a suggestion to contact customer support immediately. When the customer clicks this link we will use this information to update the customers account which will greatly increase the likelihood any login attempt on this account will be blocked by the Ravelin system if we receive no indication that the account has been reclaimed.

The page indicating a change was recognised should simply thank them for their feedback.

Change Values

The change values in the response define what change is actually being made and what the previous value was before the change. They are defined as follows:

{
  "device":{
      "deviceId": "string",
      "deviceType": "string",
      "deviceManufacturer": "string",
      "deviceModel": "string",
      "deviceOS": "string",
      "ipAddress": "string",
      "userAgent": "string",
      "timestamp": "string"
  },
  "ipAddress":{
      "ipAddress": "string",
      "timestamp": "string",
      "city": "string",
      "countryISO": "string",
      "continentISO": "string",
      "isp": "string",
      "ipAddrId": "string"
  },
  "email":{
      "email": "string",
      "timestamp": "string"
  },
  "password":{
      "timestamp": "string"
  },
  "telephone":{
      "telephone": "string",
      "telephoneCountry": "string",
      "timestamp": "string"
  },
  "deliveryAddress":{
      "streetAddress1": "string",
      "streetAddress2": "string",
      "addressLocality": "string",
      "addressRegion": "string",
      "addressCountry": "string",
      "addressCountryISO": "string",
      "postOfficeBoxNumber": "string",
      "postalCode": "string",
      "latitude": 0.0,
      "longitude": 0.0,
      "timestamp": "string",
      "locationId": "string"
  },
  "billingAddress":{
      "streetAddress1": "string",
      "streetAddress2": "string",
      "addressLocality": "string",
      "addressRegion": "string",
      "addressCountry": "string",
      "addressCountryISO": "string",
      "postOfficeBoxNumber": "string",
      "postalCode": "string",
      "latitude": 0.0,
      "longitude": 0.0,
      "timestamp": "string",
      "locationId": "string"
  }
}

Reclaiming A Customer Account

POST /v2/reclaim

In cases where an account is reclaimed by the legitimate owner you need to notify us that the account has been secured. This will prevent the account from being blocked due to activity that happened while the account was compromised. Accounts should be reclaimed if a customer login has been blocked by Ravelin because of an ATO attempt. A reclaim should also be sent if a customer experiences an ATO but the account has since been secured.

We strongly recommend notifying us about account reclaims only when you are sure that the 3rd party has lost access to the account. A reclamation on a customer account is taken into consideration during the decision making process when detecting account takeover. This means that at least for a short time, new logins are likely going to be permitted for that customer even in cases that might otherwise look suspicious.

Request

A request has a limit of 1000 customers per batch. If more customers are present in the batch, we will respond with an error.

{
    "timestamp": 1536578369411033583,
    "source": "ATO",
    "customers": [
        {
            "customerId": "customerID-1",
            "method": "PasswordReset"
        },
        {
            "customerId": "customerID-2",
            "method": "AccountDeleted"
        },
        {
            "customerId": "customerID-3",
            "method": "PasswordReset"
        }
    ]
}

Response

Successful Example

On a successful request, we will respond with a message containing the number of accounts processed. This will always be the same as the amount provided to us in request payload.

{
    "status": 200,
    "message": "3 customer accounts reclaimed successfully"
}

Failure Example

{
    "status": 400,
    "message": "No customer accounts provided. Check https://developer.ravelin.com/apis/ato/reclaim for more details",
    "traceId": "7fffffffa35375cb0292ba0fa-45c3336a-7592-4ecd-4f76-99d8d0fa2cfd",
    "timestamp": 1554811444
}