Hello Forter!

After a very interesting and fruitful period of freelancing as a consultant and developer-for-hire, I recently joined Forter's engineering team. While touring the world and working on a diverse projects is fun, Forter's people and technology simply blew my mind. It's actually been a couple of months now since I joined, but I've been so busy building cool new stuff that I hardly had time to blog about it.

Forter offers decision as a service that approves/declines every single transaction in e-commerce websites in real time, eliminating the need for manual reviews to protect against fraudsters. Forter’s decisions are covered by a 100% chargeback guarantee, even for difficult international transactions blocked by most retailers. If we were wrong, we take the hit.

The Forter system leverages machine learning and three layers of technology (behavioral, cyber intelligence and elastic identity) to automatically make decisions in real time.

I joined to lead the "elastic identity" effort, where lots of processing on "BigData" is done in real-time to identify fraudsters even when they try disguising themselves. Yeah, I never liked the term BigData, but we really do a lot of really cool stuff on lots and lots of data, and it's fun.

There is a lot going on right now so it will probably take a while until I start talking and blogging about what we do and how we do it, but it's really cool. For instance, the first thing I did here was reduce Elasticsearch query latencies from 220+ ms in the 99th percentile to below 80ms. When you try to catch smart fraudsters in real-time, every millisecond counts.

Oh, and Forter's Engineering team is now Twitter too! https://twitter.com/ForterTech.