Proxies, Tor nodes, and VPN connections can hide the true location of users online – making them easy targets for fraudulent clicks, payments, ecommerce fraud, spamming, data scraping, and more. Many businesses find it challenging to detect these users and block them from critical pages such as registration, login, and checkout. Our proxy detection API documentation demonstrates how to use Edge’s policy-based management capabilities to add proxy & VPN detection to your apps without the need for writing complex code.
What is proxy detection?
Proxy detection is a process used by website developers to identify whether or not someone is using a proxy server to hide their identity while browsing or accessing content. This is important to prevent web automation and other malicious activities that can be performed by bots.
There are many services that offer proxy / VPN detection, but not all of them are created equal. The quality of the results will vary greatly depending on the algorithms and databases used by each service. It is critical that you thoroughly test each one before deploying them in production, as the results can be vastly different from each other.
Edge’s proxy detection is powered by a powerful, scalable, and customizable algorithm that is based on the latest research in IP address reputation scoring and forensic analysis. Our solution identifies proxy, Tor, and VPN connections with significantly greater accuracy than the competition and lower false-positive rates. We are able to achieve these industry leading results by leveraging a combination of honeypots & traps, blacklists, forensics, and client feedback loops.
Our IP lookup API returns a number of useful data points including the user’s location (which is typically accurate within 25 miles), the device type, hostname, Autonomous System Number (ASN), network information, and more. In addition, we provide a proxy score which indicates the likelihood of a connection being a proxy or compromised.
You can use our API to perform a proxy check on an individual user or across your entire audience. You can also take advantage of our extensive device fingerprinting techniques which can help you identify high risk users. These include those using hacked SSH connections on ports that are known to be open on proxies, spoofing their user agent, or attempting to bypass security measures like cookie and cached data restrictions. This information can be used to make intelligent decisions about your users and their behavior such as implementing a “restricted audience” for certain content. This can help reduce fraud and abuse for online gaming communities, ecommerce websites, advertising agencies, affiliate marketers, lead generation, software developers, and more.