With data breaches on the rise, the GDPR deadline fast approaching, and the average cost to a US company for a data breach expected to surpass $7 million this year, organizations need to ask themselves “are we ready for a breach?”
Do You Think You’re a Data Breach Target?
According to a recent survey by SailPoint, three out of every five enterprises expect to experience a data breach this year. Further, 33 percent won’t even know they were breached until well after it happens, if at all. This would match similar statistics from 2016, during which 67 percent of enterprises experienced a breach. The challenge for many companies will be putting the security infrastructure in place to detect said breaches in a timely manner.
Of course, breach detection is only a piece of the puzzle. In order to truly fight against data theft, businesses need to tackle the leading cause of data breaches – weak and/or compromised credentials.
What’s In A Password?
The 2017 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report notes that weak and/or compromised credentials accounted for 81 percent of reported data breaches last year, a significant rise over the previous year’s reported 63 percent. Of course, when the most common password used was “123456” are you really surprised by this? End users will always value convenience over security, it’s a simple fact. Keeper Security’s list of the top 25 used passwords in 2016 proves that without a single complex password among them. Not to mention the lengths that people will go to work around complexity requirements.
Everyone is familiar with the “common” weak passwords like “123456,” “qwerty,” “password,” or “111111.” But now people are changing it up to accommodate for length and special character requirements by using longer strings of easily guessed characters like “zxcvbnm,” or only using a “!” when a special character is required.
Two-factor authentication is a significant improvement over passwords alone, but it doesn’t truly solve the problem of end users avoiding security for convenience.
WEBINAR ON DEMAND: The Password is Dead: An Argument for Multi Factor Biometric Authentication
Bringing Security and Convenience Together with Biometrics
Biometrics-based multi factor authentication can be the answer for organizations looking to strengthen their identity and access management infrastructure against a data breach. Not only does multi factor authentication amplify the security of any login scenario, but the addition of biometrics helps maintain a convenient solution for end users across the board.
Instead of continuing to rely on an access management solution that has been proven time and again to be ineffective at stopping data breaches, we need to embrace more modern security solutions. Biometrics offer a better way to authenticate end users and secure access to your most valuable assets, building stronger protections against data breaches by eliminating ways for hackers to gain access to your systems in the first place.
