Entrust Wednesday announced an online anti-fraud service that can be a source for information research as well as provide Entrust’s fraud-protection and third-party risk-assessment services.

Called the Entrust Open Fraud Intelligence Network, the service is expected to be used primarily by financial services firms protecting online accounts, said director of identity products and solutions, Steve Neville.

“This is for customers interested in fraud detection and that’s primarily financial services which may see the majority of attacks these days,” says Neville.

Intended for use by security administrators responsible for online security, the Entrust Open Fraud Intelligence Network provides Web-based access to news stories concerning security as well as a resource library on legal and technical subjects.

“The resource library contains information related to legislation, for instance,” said Neville. In addition, the service centralizes access to Entrust’s TransactionGuard fraud detection service as well as third-party services from IPGeo, MaxMind and others.

“For instance, the service lets you query a particular IP address against a threat index to understand the value of that IP right now, is it associated with fraud,” says Neville.

The service, available now, ranges in cost based on number of online customers, Neville said, but for a bank with one million online banking customers, the cost would be less than 10 cents per year per customer.