When large organizations like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook report password hacks, it throws some light on how vulnerable current systems are, as well as the need for multi-factor authentication. However, multi-factor authentication is shrouded in myths that may prevent organizations from adopting it.
Here, we have addressed a few of the most common myths surrounding multi-factor authentication.
Best practices and common sense dictate that we use unique, hard-to-guess passwords for each application that we use. However, most of us place convenience over security and give in to the worst password habit – using a single, easy-to-remember password across all our applications. This is simply because of the management of multiple passwords, each following different password policy rules, can be difficult. The problem with this approach is that our single password if hacked or even guessed successfully, can be used in a credential stuffing attack to gain access to several of our personal accounts.
WebAuthn (Web Authentication API) is a global standard specification for secure authentication on the Web, formulated in 2018 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
This browser-based API allows user authentication on web applications through the creation of strong “credentials” and user-agent-mediated access to authenticators. This could be either in the form of hardware tokens (like U2F security keys) or in-built modules (biometric readers like Google Hello, Apple Touch ID) in the platform. Web Authn has garnered the support of all leading browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, and is compatible with all leading platforms.
While it is natural to feel apprehensive on the cloud, especially if you are new to it, remember that there are a number of ways to stay in control of your organization’s applications and data, even while ensuring that authorized users can access them with greater ease.
Here are 7 ways in which Akku, the Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution from CloudNow, can help you address security challenges
As organizations increasingly place their data and applications across multiple locations on the cloud, zero trust security is rapidly gaining ground as the network security model of choice among enterprises.
Zero Trust Security is a security model in which a user, irrespective of whether he/she is within or outside the network perimeter, requires an additional verification to get access into a network. There is no particular technology or software product associated with this security model. It simply requires an additional security layer to verify users. This could be anything from biometric verification like thumb-print scanning, or a digital signature verification. Of the two, biometric verification is preferable as it can neither be recreated nor hacked.
On average, every person has 7.6 accounts – that’s a lot of user IDs and passwords for an individual! Remembering the user ID and password for all these accounts is obviously very cumbersome, and third party service providers have capitalized on this to provide password management services. A password manager is essentially a single repository for all your credentials. Two very popular password managers are LastPass and Dashlane. These are applications which will store your credentials in a “secure” database. However, they haven’t been spared by hackers, who breached their security to get access to thousands of user credentials.
Governments across the globe rely increasingly on technology today to serve their citizens better. But with the rapid evolution of technology, it is often a struggle for the different departments of government to keep up. This happens due to insufficient funds, security concerns or simply a lack of motivation to meticulously plan and implement the move.
Of these, security is the most critical consideration, since government agencies and departments are possibly the first line of defense against any cyber attack. This is especially true when it comes to government entities wanting to migrate their operations to the cloud.
Security and privacy of user data are crucial for any organization and is also a major area of risk. So a Secure and Efficient Authentication (SEA) is very important.
How do you make authentication secure and efficient? Let me share some insights on how this can be achieved through certificate-based authentication…
Cloud technology has broken several operational barriers to make remote data access easy. It allows you to scale your business with minimal cost while securely holding business-critical data and applications. But with all these advantages comes a catch – managing personnel access for all the applications and files in your network has become increasingly cumbersome.
Identity and Access Management (or IAM) solutions – also known as Identity Management (IdM) solutions – form a critical component of an enterprise’s IT security. And when used with cloud-based applications, they form part of a powerful cloud security set up too.
