Growing up on a dairy farm, my great grandpa would speak of a time when he didn’t have pasteurizing equipment. Customers then had to trust the dairy farmer was milking cows with clean hands, using a clean bucket, and placing the milk in clean milk bottles before being placed on the shelf. If our dairy became known for selling milk that made people sick, it could tarnish our reputation and put us out of business.
In order to satisfy state and federal government guidelines, Great Grandpa eventually had to add pasteurizing equipment. The cost of such equipment put many other long-time dairies out of business, but for him, it became a necessary cost of doing business. The pasteurization equipment ensured that the milk was free of impurities and that customers weren’t drinking something that would make them sick.
Much like it became necessary to pasteurize milk decades ago, it is now becoming increasingly necessary to secure data. While I was growing up on a dairy farm, computers were becoming more widely known and used in the workforce and schools. At that time, when computers were in their immature infancy, data was not secured. Computers were used simply for input and output, much like the calculator that sat next to the old-fashioned cash register at the dairy. There weren’t usernames or passwords.
Time progressed so that by 2019, the average person juggles between 70 to 80 passwords across multiple accounts (according to NordPass). On top of that, it became important to change these passwords frequently. I remember seeing a poster that said, “Passwords are like underwear. Change frequently.” Doing so required processes that enabled password resets. Many times passwords are the weakest link and greatest vulnerability to cybersecurity we have today. Hackers know this, so they use your password to infiltrate systems and nobody is even aware of the compromise.
It’s time to upgrade, just like Great Grandpa did on the dairy decades ago.
Now, a password can be used only once, and artificial intelligence (AI) then takes over for continuous authentication, keeping the hackers at bay. AI does all the work in the background so you don’t have to keep entering a username and password over and over again—what people in our industry call Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) fatigue. AI becomes a “fingerprint” and how you can authenticate access to all your documentation and applications used daily. AI mark-up language uses Arculix’s patented algorithms to make a password benign in protecting your daily application access. If the AI process is bypassed, it is like selling bad milk to customers. It really does remind me of pasteurizing milk for daily consumption.
Listen to a webinar today to explore this topic further: MFA Fatigue: Fighting a Two-Front War.
