RSA Spins Off Fraud & Risk Intelligence Unit

RSA Security will spin out its Fraud & Risk Intelligence division into a new stand-alone company called Outseer, which will continue to provide anti-fraud and payment security tools in a newly established portfolio.

Outseer will be led by CEO Reed Taussig, who was appointed CEO of RSA's Anti-Fraud Business Unit late last year. As a self-directed company with its own identity, Outseer will continue to offer RSA Security products in a portfolio that will be rebranded as part of the transition.

These include account monitoring tool Outseer Fraud Manager (formerly called RSA Adaptive Authentication), digital payments authentication tool Outseer 3-D Secure (formerly called RSA Adaptive Authentication for eCommerce), and Outseer FraudAction (formerly called RSA FraudAction), which detects and provides data on phishing sites, malicious apps, and fake social media pages.

The news follows a year of massive growth in ecommerce as the world relied on virtual transactions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research shows more than half of consumers in the US were using contactless payment, which require no physical contact between the payment device and a physical terminal, by July 2020. Thirty percent had adopted contactless card options such as a mobile wallet or app.

During this time, cybercriminals followed suit with a range of attacks targeting financial institutions, payment networks, and consumers. Last summer, the FBI warned of an increase in fraudulent websites that emerged to take advantage of online shoppers during the pandemic. Shortly after, thousands of ecommerce sites running outdated software were targeted in an automated attack. Research later showed that 1.3 billion fraud attacks were conducted in the third quarter of 2020, with around 70 million leveraging credential stuffing techniques.

Outseer said in a release today that its product portfolio runs with the Outseer Global Data Network, a consortium of verified fraud and transaction data, as well as the Outseer Risk Engine.

As ecommerce attacks evolve, Outseer says it plans to continue building out its payment authentication tools, aligning with the EMV 3-D Secure payment standard, a messaging protocol that enables people to authenticate themselves to their payment card issue when making card-not-present (CNP) ecommerce transactions. The company also plans to integrate new technology across payments and ecommerce systems.

The Outseer announcement follows RSA's acquisition last year by a consortium led by Symphony Technology Group, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, and AlpInvest Partners, which marked its separation from Dell Technologies. This deal, which valued the company at $2.1 billion, made RSA an independent company.