Threat Modeling for Marketing Campaigns
Marketing campaigns and referrals programs can reliably drive growth. But whenever you offer something of value on the Internet, some people will take advantage of your campaign. How can you balance driving growth with preventing financial loss from unchecked fraud?
In this blog post, I want to share what we learned about how to discourage and respond to fraud when building marketing campaigns for e-commerce websites. I personally found there wasn’t a plethora of resources in the security community focused on the specific challenges faced by marketing campaigns, and that motivated me to try and provide more information on the topic for others — hopefully you find this helpful!
Overview
Since our experience came from developing a referrals program at Etsy, I want to describe our program and how we created terms of service to discourage fraud. Then rather than getting into very specific details about what we do to respond in real-time to fraud, I want to outline useful questions for anyone building these kinds of programs to ask themselves.
Our Referrals Program
We encouraged people to invite their friends to shop on the site. When the friend created an account on Etsy, we gave them $5.00 to spend on their first purchase. We also wanted to reward the person who invited them, as a thank-you gift.
Of course, we knew that any program that gives out free money is an attractive one to try and hack! !.
Discourage Bad Behavior from the Start
First, we wanted to make our program sustainable through proactive defenses. When we designed the program we tried to bake in rules to make the program less attractive to attackers. However, we didn&39;t want these rules to introduce roadblocks in the product that made the program less valuable from users’ perspectives, or financially unsustainable from a business perspective. In the end, we decided on the following restrictions. We wanted there to be a minimum spend requirement for buyers to apply their discount to a purchase. We hoped that requiring buyers to put in some of their own money to get the promotion would attract more genuine shoppers and discourage fraud.
We also put limits on the maximum amount we’d pay out in rewards to the person inviting their friends (though we’re keeping an eye out for any particularly successful inviters, so we can congratulate them personally). And we are currently only disbursing rewards to inviters after two of their invited friends make a purchase.
Model All Possible Scenarios
A key principle of Etsy’s approach to security is that it’s important to model out all possible approaches of attack, notice the ones that are easiest to accomplish or result in the biggest payouts if successful, and work on making them more difficult, so it becomes less economical for fraudsters to try those attacks.
In constructing these plans, we first tried to differentiate the ways our program could be attacked and by what kind of users. Doing this, we quickly realized that we wanted to respond differently to users with a record of good behavior on the site from users who didn’t have a good history or who were redeeming many referrals, possibly with automated scripts. We also wanted to have the ability to adjust the boundaries of the two categories over time.
So the second half of our defense against fraud consisted of plans on how to monitor and react to suspected fraud as well as how to prevent attackers in the worst-case scenario from redeeming large amounts of money.
Steps to Develop a Mitigation Plan
I have to admit upfront, I’m being a little ambiguous about what we’ve actually implemented, but I believe it doesn’t really matter since each situation will differ in the particulars. That being said, here are the questions that guided the development of our program, that could guide your thinking too.
1. How can you determine whether two user accounts represent the same person in real life?
This question is really key. In order to detect fraud on a referrals program, you need to be able to tell if the same person is signing up for multiple accounts.
This question is really key. In order to detect fraud on a referrals program, you need to be able to tell if the same person is signing up for multiple accounts.
In our program, we kept track of many measures of similarity. One important kind of relatedness was what we called “invite relatedness.” A person looking to get multiple credits is likely to have generated multiple invites off of one original account. To check for this, and other cases, we had to keep a graph data structure of whether one user had invited another via a referral and do a breadth first search to determine related accounts.
Another important type of connection between accounts is often called “fingerprint relatedness.” We keep track of fingerprints (unique identifying characteristics of an account) and user to fingerprint relationships, so we can look up what accounts share fingerprints. There are a lot of resources available about how to fingerprint accounts in the security community that I would highly recommend researching!
Here’s an example of a very simple invite graph of usernames, colored by fingerprint relatedness. As you can see, the root user SarahJ28 might have invited three people, but two of them are related to her via other identifying characteristics.
2. At what point in time are all the different signals of identity discussed in the previous question available to you?
You don’t know everything about a user from the instant they land on your site. At that point in time, you might only have a little bit of information about their IP and browser. You start to learn a bit more about them based on their email if they sign up for an account, and you certainly have more substantive information for analysis when they perform other actions on the site, like making purchases.
Generally, our ability to detect identity gets stronger the more engaged someone is with the site, or the closer they move towards making a purchase. However, if someone has a credit on their account that you don’t want them to have, you need to identify them before they complete their purchase. The level of control you have over the process of purchasing will depend on how you process credit card transactions on your site.
3. What are the different actions you could take on user accounts if you discover that one user has invited many related accounts to a referrals program?
There’s generally a range of different actions that can be taken against user accounts on a site. Actions that were relevant to us included: banning user accounts, taking away currently earned promotional credits, blocking promotional credits from being applied to a purchase transaction, and taking away the ability to refer more people using our program.
4. Do any actions need to be reviewed by a person or can they be automatic? What’s the cost of doing a manual review?On the other hand, how would a user feel if an automated action was taken against their account based on a false positive?
We knew that in some cases we would feel comfortable programming automated consequences to user accounts, while in other cases we wanted manual review of the suspected account first. It was really helpful for us to work with the teams who would be reviewing the suspected accounts on this from the beginning. They had seen lots of types of fraud in the past and helped us calibrate our expectations around false positives from each type of signal.
Luckily for us at Etsy, it’s quite easy to code the creation of tasks for our support team to review from any part of our web stack. I highly recommend architecting this ability if you don’t already have it for your site because it’s useful in many situations besides this one. Of course, we had to be very mindful that the real cost would come from continually reviewing the tasks over time.
5. How can you combine what you know about identity and user behavior (at each point in time) with your range of possible actions to come up with checks that you feel comfortable with? Do these checks need to block the action a user is trying to take?
We talked about each of these points where we evaluated a user’s identity and past behavior as a “check” that could either implement one of these actions I described or create a task for a person to review.
This meant we also had to decide whether the check needed to block the user from completing an action, like getting a promotional credit on their account, or applying a promotional credit to a transaction, and how that action was currently implemented on the site.
It’s important to note that if the user is trying to accomplish something in the scope of a single web request, there is a tradeoff between how thoroughly you can investigate someone’s identity and how quickly you can return a response to the user. After all, there are over 30 million user accounts on Etsy and we could potentially need to compare fingerprints across all of them. To solve this problem, we had to figure out how to kick off asynchronously running jobs at key points (especially checkout) that could do the analysis offline, but would nevertheless provide the protection we wanted.
6. How visible are account statuses throughout your internal systems?
Once you’ve taken an automated or manual action against an account, is that clearly marked on that user account throughout your company’s internal tools? A last point of attack may be that someone writes in complaining their promo code didn’t work. If this happens, it’s important for the person answering that email to know they’ve been flagged as under investigation or deemed fraudulent.
7. Do you have reviews of your system scheduled for concrete dates in the future? Can you filter fraudulent accounts from your metrics when you want to?
If your referrals campaign doesn’t have a concrete end date, then it’s easy to forget about how it’s performing, not just in terms of meeting business goals but in terms of fraud. It’s important to have an easy way to filter out duplicate user accounts to calculate true growth, as well as how much of an effect unchecked fraud would have had on the program and how much was spent on what was deemed an acceptable, remaining risk. If we had discovered that too much was being spent on allowing good users to get away with a few duplicate referrals, we could have tightened our guidelines and started taking away the ability to send referrals from accounts more frequently.
We found that when we opened up tasks for manual review, the team member reviewing them marked them as accurate 75% of the time. This was pretty good relative to other types of tasks we review. We were also pretty generous in the end in trusting that multiple members of a household might be using the same credit card info.
Conclusion
Our project revealed that some fraud is catastrophic and should absolutely be prevented, while other types of fraud, like a certain level of duplicate redemptions in marketing campaigns, are less dangerous and require a gentler response or even a degree of tolerance.
We have found it useful to review what could happen, design the program with rules to discourage all kinds fraud while keeping value to the user in mind, have automated checks as well as manual reviews, and monitoring that includes the ability to segment the performance of our program based on fraud rate.
Many thanks to everyone at Etsy, but especially our referrals team, the risk and integrity teams, the payments team, and the security team for lots of awesome collaboration on this project!