Given that most organizations live and die by the data they store on their networks and in the cloud-based applications, it stands to reason that controlling access to that is paramount to ensure security. Not just security from damage or loss, but even corporate image and reputation. The days of relying solely on username/password combinations is long gone and now Identity Access Management strategies must continuously evolve to stay ahead of the game.
IAM Requires MFA
Multi-Factor Authentication is coming into its own as more organizations recognize the complete vulnerability of password-based authentication. More press is coming to light, first on the impact of stolen credentials and the vulnerability of passwords and second on the value of multi-factor authentication. It is important enough that even the NSA is suggesting that you should transition to MFA immediately.
For those not familiar with the National Security Agency (NSA), they are the top security organization in the United States and report into the Department of Defense. The NSA is a national-level intelligence agency responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for foreign and domestic intelligence and counterintelligence purposes and clearly knows a thing or two about what it takes to be secure.
The NSA published a Cyber Information Brief that covers their Top Ten Cybersecurity Mitigation Strategies, one of which proposes that everyone should Transition to Multi-Factor Authentication, specifically:
“Prioritize protection for accounts with elevated privileges, remote access, and/or used on high value assets. Physical token-based authentication systems should be used to supplement knowledge-based factors such as passwords and PINs. Organizations should migrate away from single factor authentication, such as password-based systems, which are subject to poor user choices and susceptible to credential theft, forgery, and reuse across multiple systems.”
So, now that you are ready for MFA, how has this concept evolved in order to truly be secure?
IAM Ecosystem Evolves
Most users are extremely busy and don’t have time to waste on remembering passwords, retrieving and typing in PINs or scanning various body parts in order to differentiate their identity from someone else. What is needed today to ensure your Identity Access Management strategy is as secure as possible is to establish some form of immutable identity for your users. An immutable identity is not capable or susceptible to change. In short it can provide a unique way to authenticate individual users without the fear of impersonation, hijacking or stuffing.
It turns out that an immutable identity is possible by combining your physical behaviors, attributes and Digital DNA and tracking that data in a manner that protects privacy and security of that data. This is called behavioral authentication and when combined with a continuous approach (pre, during and post authentication) it creates the ultimate evolution to your Identity Access Management strategy.
The Catalyst Is Continuous Behavioral Authentication
Without creating and managing an immutable digital identity, it doesn’t matter how big or small your identity access management ecosystem. There will always be some leak in which cyber criminals can either credential stuff, credential hijack or credential impersonate. By adding a continuous behavioral authentication solution into your IAM ecosystem, you effectively eliminate all of these threats and create an immutable identity for your users.
Acceptto’s eGuardian engine continuously creates, and monitors user behavior profiles based on the user interaction with the It’sMe authenticator. Every time an activity occurs, actionable intelligence is gathered and used to optimize the user profile. eGuardian is capable of autonomously and continually learning new policies and adapting existing ones. While policies can still be manually defined and contribute to the computation, our Biobehavioral AIML approach automatically finds the optimal policy for each transaction. eGuardian leverages a mixture of AI & ML, expert systems and SMEs to classify, detect, and model behavior, and assign real-time risk scores to continuously validate your identity prior to, during and post-authentication.
Download the Intellyx’s whitepaper titled App Authentication Evolves in a World of Compromised Credentials today and then check out what Acceptto can do to ensure your employees, partners and customers can authenticate without passwords and still ensure security and privacy registering for a free demo today.
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