Just in the 3rd quarter of last year alone, the U.S. government recorded around 145.2 million losses due to online fraud. This number is expected to grow as cybersecurity experts foresee a cyberattack for every 11 seconds this year. The said forecast also pegged the estimated annual loss due to fraud at $6.1 trillion.

While these hackers are expected to go after the big fishes that belonged to the Fortune 500 companies, it doesn’t mean that they’ll spare small and medium-size businesses from their nefarious activities. In fact, this means that if the large corporations are vulnerable to their attacks, how much more are small and medium enterprises?

There are different fingerprinting techniques. Though they differ in name and type of information being gathered, they all share the same purpose --- tracking users down, isolating those that show suspicious online transactions, and providing an added layer of security to a website. Here are two of the most common fingerprinting techniques, including a discussion of their salient features, points of similarities, and differences.

Device Fingerprinting: What Is it, and How Does it Work?

This is a fingerprinting technique that uses scripts to identify devices and their specific configurations. They are like site cookies, except that they’re never saved or stored in the user’s device and server side. Aside from the session cookies it gathers, it also offers a plethora of data sent when the server receives a web request. This technology creates fingerprints based on the following data points:

• Client time zone
• Device installed fonts
• Flash plugin-provided flash data
• HTTP request headers
• Information about the device’s language, operating system, touch support, and screen resolution
• Installed plugins
• IP address
• Mime-types
• Silverlight data
• Timestamp
• User-agent string

When a user visits a specific website, his device fingerprints get calculated. The JavaScript tracker within the script collects all the necessary device information such as OS, browser type, browser version, and more. After this, the system plays the detective role by using the internet user-provided information bits to narrow down their device details.

The data miners behind the fingerprinting technology put the gathered data together and assign a unique hash or fingerprint. When this info is used with cookies and other common data identifiers, the attribution and tracking tasks significantly improve. The hash calculation and storing all involve intensive computation processes. This explains why running this technology needs a considerable storage amount. Otherwise, the fingerprints won’t be distributed back to the source browser. This strategy has become immensely popular simply because of the sheer impossibility of blocking the fingerprint creation device. They run in the background and look precisely like other common scripts, making them impossible to detect.

Browser Fingerprinting: What Is it and How Does it Work?

When fraudsters and spammers think turning their cookies off and browsing incognito keeps them undetected, they’re making a huge mistake. Websites using browser fingerprinting techniques can still track them down and stop them from accessing the site.

This is one of the common ways for websites to track and remember individual devices and computers. When a user opens a website, this technique loads packets of data onto the visitor’s computers called ‘cookies.’ Websites can only contain codes that take fingerprints from the computers accessing them.

The purpose of browser fingerprinting is web tracking. This is a more secretive tracking method than tracking cookies. While the latter requires consent, the former doesn’t. The companies that collect these pieces of data help website owners like you to keep spammers, hackers, and spoofers from stealing personal and financial information.

To understand the gravity of the issue this technology is trying to remedy, imagine operating an online store that supports various payment channels at check-out. If you don’t add extra security layers, hackers can steal the identity of your customers, make fraudulent transactions through your website, and spam your inbox. If these practices continue, your store might suffer from refund and chargeback requests from your scammed customers. At worst, you might be forced to close down as your customers refuse to do business with you again.

Browser fingerprinting can help add layers of security to your website without affecting the user experience of your legitimate traffic. By identifying and isolating visitor IDs that show malicious browsing history and online activities, you can effectively prevent fraud from the source. After identifying them, browser fingerprinting can also send these visitor IDs to the site blacklist to keep them from accessing your website again.

How Are These Two Techniques Different?

As they would put it, the devil is in the details, and in this case, the tiny details are what separate these two terms. Device fingerprinting is defined as the process of identifying the unique characteristics of every device that visits a website. This technology uses signals. On the other hand, browser fingerprinting is a subsegment of the more extensive umbrella of device fingerprinting. However, the purpose of using signals for data gathering is focused more on the browser.

A more significant majority of browser fingerprinting can only uniquely identify the browser and not the device used to access it. Meaning, even if you use one PC, but you visit the same website from different browsers (one via Chrome, and the other through Microsoft Edge), the hash will identify you as two distinct persons. This goes without saying that you use the device fingerprinting technique if you want a more specific and accurate identification. In the lingo of fingerprinting-savvy people and data miners, device fingerprinting is considered as the identification ‘holy grail.’

Unfortunately, no matter how specific and accurate this technique is, there are currently no device-specific signals that can accurately identify each site visitor. And because most site visitors might share computers with others, there’s a lack of unique signals to tell these users apart.

If you use browser-specific signals, you can pinpoint more differences from one user to another, making the fingerprinting tool you used a reliable identification tool. Site visitors sometimes come up with workarounds to skirt browser fingerprint protections. However, they are only permitted to do this once for every browser. This means that even the most quick-witted and determined fraudster might run out of options fast.

Interested in the advancement of the healthcare industry? Read ”The Future of Healthcare Technology in 2021” to learn more.