Avivah Litan — A Member of the Gartner Blog Network

Avivah Litan — A Member of the Gartner Blog Network
Well sorry to say, at least from a fraud detection perspective, that tagging machines and linking the machines to a user’s identity works well for identifying good guys but does nothing to help identify the bad ones. Bad guys know how to take over good-guy user machines and launch their stealth attacks from them, masquerading their true identities under the cloak of a ‘good’ PC or mobile computing device.

Of course, hardware level machine identification is a good way to tag a PC, but there are other options available that are in fact more effective at catching the crooks. One thing is obvious – fraudsters won’t let the computing devices they use to perpetrate their crimes be tagged as ‘bad.’ They will just delete the tags, if they can, or use a different PC that is either not tagged or tagged as ‘good.’

In sum, hardware level tagging of users’ computing devices is a good way to tag good users and is a good way to track them. But good security means we need to identify the bad users, not just the good ones. And this approach, on its own, does nothing to stop a bad user from taking over a good machine.