IP Address Fraud Check: MMDB

Scamalytics provides the same data available in our API, and on our website, as a high-performance, on-premises MMDB file. This gives customers the option of hosting our entire database within their own infrastructure, offering unlimited, lightning-fast lookups, with no data leaving the customer's internal environment.

To access our MMDB files, please complete the quick form below:

Request MMDB access

Use cases

The typical use case would be checking the fraud risk presented by a user who is connecting to your online service. The user's IP address would be checked against our risk profile for that IP address. Our MMDB solution allows these checks to be performed at large scale, at very low latency, and with no information transferred to Scamalytics in order to perform the check. Specific use cases include:

• Ad networks wanting to prevent click fraud, where micro-second latency is a key consideration within their ad stack.
• Financial institutions looking to prevent account takeovers, where keeping user data (including IP addresses) entirely within their own infrastructure is a key requirement for compliance.
• Social networks looking to prevent fraudulent use of their platform, where checks must be done at massive scale.

Data

A full definition of the data we provide can be supplied on request, but in summary the MMDB file contains:

• Scamalytics score - Our numeric risk score and discrete risk levels.
• Proxy - Whether the IP address is being used as proxy, and if so, what type of proxy.
• Responsible party - The ISP and organisation responsible for the IP address, and the ASN it belongs to.
• Geo - The location of the IP address.

Benefits of MMDB

Our MMDB solution offers the following benefits over our API solution:

• On premises - Customers can host the entire solution within their infrastructure.
• High performance - MMDB supports up to millions of lookups per second.
• Low latency - Lookups can be executed in the low microseconds.
• Easy update - performing an update is as simple as renaming a file.
• Zero compliance overhead - no user data is transferred to Scamalytics.
• Wide support - MMDB is compatible with most programming languages.

Please note: The exact performance of an MMDB implementation will depend on a number of factors, including the data being queried, the MMDB library used, and the hardware hosting the implementation.

How to work with MMDB

MMDB are binary files, with a data object keyed on an IP address range. The range can be as small as a single IP address. MMDB reader libraries exist for all major software languages, which allow an application to pass in an IP address, and receive the data object relating to that IP address in return. Updating to the latest data is a case of switching out the existing MMDB file for the latest MMDB file.

Delivery mechanism

We provide a fresh MMDB data file to download from our servers over HTTPS, using an easy-to-automate delivery mechanism.

Switching to the latest file is then as simple as changing a filename on either the filesystem, or within the application.

An example request would be:

https://<servername>.scamalytics.com/<username>/<filename>?key=<key>

Where:

• <servername> is the name of the server allocated by Scamalytics to provide the service.
• <username> is the username allocated to the customer by Scamalytics.
• <filename> is the name of the MMDB file.
• <key> is a key allocated to the customer by Scamalytics.

Request access

To access our MMDB files, please complete the quick form below:

Request MMDB access