"As long as you behave as a normal individual, it is difficult to capture first time fraudster," said CEO Reed Taussig. "Ordinarily, he would have to do something outside the norm. With Device ID, if he's cloaking his device, hiding behind a proxy, we inform the customer."

The market for Device ID is currently dominated by financial institutions aiming to curb ID fraud and credit card account theft, but Taussig said he sees social networking is an emerging growth space as well. If you have a gaming site, for example, where you have the same character logging in from two different locations at the same time, then you have a problem. In another case, Device ID could help stop prostitution rings from operating on dating sites. Finally, Taussig said there's a compelling market for retail sites both in affiliate programs and in processing Card Not Present purchases online.

Threatmetrix, which is sold as a solution, provides a deep inspection of the TCIP packet so that when someone logs into a bank online, over 150 parameters are inspected in real time. Among these are use of a proxy, using a known compromised PC, and turning off Javascript or cookies.

Any of these events could happen to the best of us--and for the best of reasons--so Threatmetrix scores these and delivers that final score to the enterprise customer, which may or may not choose to follow up with the customer in a phone call or delay the transaction until further notice. The scores produced by Threatmetrix also have reason codes, said Taussig, so a lower score can be explained quickly upon review, keeping customers happy.

New in this version are tools to determine whether this is a single computer concurrently logging into several different account names, or one username being logged in by multiple PCs, activity say from a botnet, a loose network of compromised desktop computers. Additionally, the service looks at how fast a given account is accessed (humans can react only so fast). In most cases the abnormalities are fraud scenarios. Threatmetrix knows of about 200 million compromised machines worldwide, but Taussig said his company only keeps an active database of about 12 million.