Preventing account creation fraud with AWS WAF Fraud Control account creation fraud prevention (ACFP)
This section explains what AWS WAF Fraud Control account creation fraud prevention (ACFP) does.
Account creation fraud is an online illegal activity in which an attacker tries to create one or more fake accounts. Attackers use fake accounts for fraudulent activities such as abusing promotional and sign up bonuses, impersonating someone, and cyberattacks like phishing. The presence of fake accounts can negatively impact your business by damaging your reputation with customers and exposure to financial fraud.
You can monitor and control account creation fraud attempts by implementing the ACFP
feature. AWS WAF offers this feature in the AWS Managed Rules rule group AWSManagedRulesACFPRuleSet with companion application
integration SDKs.
The ACFP managed rule group labels and manages requests that might be part of malicious account creation attempts. The rule group does this by inspecting account creation attempts that clients send to your application's account sign-up endpoint.
ACFP protects your account sign-up pages by monitoring account sign-up requests for anomalous activity and by automatically blocking suspicious requests. The rule group uses request identifiers, behavioral analysis, and machine learning to detect fraudulent requests.
Request inspection – ACFP gives you visibility and control over anomalous account creation attempts and attempts that use stolen credentials, to prevent the creation of fraudulent accounts. ACFP checks email and password combinations against its stolen credential database, which is updated regularly as new leaked credentials are found on the dark web. ACFP evaluates the domains used in email addresses, and monitors the use of phone numbers and address fields to verify the entries and to detects fraudulent behavior. ACFP aggregates data by IP address and client session, to detect and block clients that send too many requests of a suspicious nature.
Response inspection – For CloudFront distributions, in addition to inspecting incoming account creation requests, the ACFP rule group inspects your application's responses to account creation attempts, to track success and failure rates. Using this information, ACFP can temporarily block client sessions or IP addresses that have too many failed attempts. AWS WAF performs response inspection asynchronously, so this doesn't increase latency in your web traffic.
Note
You are charged additional fees when you use this managed rule group. For more information, see AWS WAF Pricing
Note
The ACFP feature is not available for Amazon Cognito user pools.
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