minFraud Release Notes - 2021 Archive

Update to minimum accuracy_radius value

Effective October 4, 2021, the minimum accuracy radius value will be 5km across our city/postal-level geolocation products and services. Previously, the minimum accuracy radius value was 1km. This change applies to the following products and services:

• GeoIP2 City database
• GeoLite2 City database
• GeoIP2 Enterprise database
• GeoIP2 City Plus web service
• GeoIP2 Insights web service
• minFraud Insights and Factors web services

We are making this change in order to ensure it is clear that IP geolocation should not be used to identify a particular street address or household.

Data Updates for Apple iCloud Private Relay

We have updated our data in a number of ways in preparation for the rollout of iCloud Private Relay. We have worked with Apple to ensure that our data accurately reflects how Private Relay works and delivers the best possible user experience for your users.

• Geolocation data across our products and services now incorporate the IP geolocation feeds published by Apple, which provides coarse city or region geolocation mappings for iCloud Private Relay IPs.
• We identify iCloud Private Relay IPs in our ISP dataset (present in our minFraud Insights and Factors web services) by tagging ranges as iCloud Private Relay.

Apple has shared the following assurances built into Private Relay:

• Geolocation information for clients is validated by the relay servers using signed tokens, and visible to origins through the IP addresses selected by relay servers.
  • A user is not able to arbitrarily select their geolocation to evade geolocation controls.
• Access to relay servers is rate-limited using device attestation to reduce fraud.
• All traffic is secured using TLS 1.3.

You do not need to take any action to receive this data. It will be returned in the /traits/isp and /traits/organization outputs.

For more information about Private Relay along with helpful technical information, visit Prepare Your Network or Web Server for Private Relay on Apple’s developer website.

We will continue to monitor these IPs and make any adjustments that are needed in the future.

New minFraud features: passing 3-D Secure outcome, custom rule label in minFraud response, “test” disposition for custom rules

We have released a couple of new features for the minFraud Score, Insights, and Factors service.

• A new input, /credit_card/was_3d_secure_successful, which allows you to send us whether the outcome of 3-D Secure verification was successful. This can help us improve your risk scoring.
• A new output, /disposition/rule_label, which returns the label of the custom rule that affected a transaction.
• A new value for the /disposition/action output, “test”. This additional disposition action can be used to separate transactions for rules which you are interested in actively testing without affecting your existing workflows.

For more information, see our blog post.

Our client APIs have been updated to support these outputs so may need to refresh yours if you are not interfacing directly with our REST API.

Updated warning codes in minFraud Score, Insights, and Factors

We updated warning codes for minFraud Score, Insights and Factors responses in the /warnings/ object.

• We added BILLING_REGION_NOT_FOUND and SHIPPING_REGION_NOT_FOUND codes

• We updated the warning explanations for certain warning codes to include that distance calculations (outlined below) may be impacted when certain location information is missing or cannot be found

  • /shipping_address/distance_to_ip_location
  • /shipping_address/distance_to_billing_address
  • /billing_address/distance_to_ip_location

See our developer documentation for the updated codes and warnings.

Updates to minFraud Alerts

We recently made some updates to minFraud alerts, which notifies minFraud users about previously low-risk transactions that are now high-risk due to updated information. Learn more on our blog.

Normalize Emails Before Hashing for Improved minFraud Scoring

The client APIs for minFraud Score, Insights, and Factors now normalize emails prior to hashing them for improved risk scoring. Email normalization ensures that minor, inconsequential differences in the email input (i.e., jadoeisonline@yahoo.com and jadoeisonline-12345@yahoo.com) do not result in minFraud treating these as different email addresses.

Our client APIs for minFraud Score, Insights, and Factors have been updated to support email normalization so you may need to refresh yours in order to get automatic email normalization. If you interface directly with our REST API or use minFraud Legacy, we recommend that you normalize email addresses prior to hashing. Please see our developer’s site for guidance on how to normalize emails.

New output IP risk reasons

The ip_address/risk_reasons output is now available. minFraud Insights and minFraud Factors customers can now see reason codes associated with the IP risk score for high risk IP addresses. When the IP risk score is high, the field may be populated with one or more of the following reason codes:

• ANONYMOUS_IP – The IP address belongs to an anonymous network. See /ip_address/traits for more information.
• HIGH_RISK_DEVICE – A high risk device was seen on this IP address in your past transactions.
• HIGH_RISK_EMAIL – A high risk email address was seen on this IP address in your past transactions.
• BILLING_POSTAL_VELOCITY – Many different billing postal codes have been seen on this IP address in your past transactions.
• EMAIL_VELOCITY – Many different email addresses have been seen on this IP address in your past transactions.
• ISSUER_ID_NUMBER_VELOCITY – Many different issuer ID numbers have been seen on this IP address in your past transactions.
• MINFRAUD_NETWORK_ACTIVITY – Suspicious activity has been seen on this IP address across minFraud customers.

If the IP risk score is low, the risk_reasons field will be blank. Our client APIs have been updated to support this output so you may need to refresh yours in order to see the new output if you are not interfacing directly with our REST API.

Change to Vodafone Germany ISP name

On Monday, January 25 we will be updating MaxMind products and services with ISP data to consolidate naming conventions for Vodafone Germany. We will now return either Vodafone Germany Cable, Vodafone Germany DSL, Vodafone Germany Business, or Vodafone Germany. Previous values were Vodafone GmbH, Vodafone Germany, and Vodafone DSL. We are updating these values to more accurately reflect the type of connection that the IP address is associated with.