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by milesskorpen 4214 days ago
It isn't at all obvious to me why you can't reveal more information, unless your signals are something trivial a hacker could mimic. Please explain more.
2 comments

Here's the unfortunate truth: a good majority of security companies out there are banking on the hope that the signals they are looking for are not known to hackers and so cannot be mimicked or evaded.

>unless your signals are something trivial a hacker could mimic

Name any security product out there, whether they make software tools or hardware appliances, and chances are there is a set of trivial signals a malicious actor can mimic to appear to be trusted by that product, or a set of trivial signals to avoid to prevent being considered malicious.

And yet those products can still provide tremendous value. There is serious value in a large team of intelligent, experienced, resourceful people spending 8-10 hours a day tracking fraud and crime patterns so they can detect suspicious activity and meticulously add to and update their signatures. Yes, if their list of signatures was published on a fraud forum, the fraudsters would see it and take advantage of it and the company would have more workload trying to detect the new pattern changes. But it's still a useful service for many people.

My only concern in OP's case is that neither he nor his company has any track record in the security industry. He's perfectly reasonable to not reveal the precise technical details of how they're detecting suspicious activity, though.

Does Google tell people the signals it uses for websearch?

Does Gmail tell people the signals it uses for spam classification?

Actually even today, does Google tell the signals it uses for its new Recaptcha?: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/12/are-you-rob...