Breaking the Ransomware Kill Chain

2022 will go down as the year when multi-factor authentication (MFA) failed. A record number of organizations of all types suffered attacks from malicious cyber criminals, and the losses totaled billions of dollars. Membership in the victims' club is skyrocketing with thousands more joining Uber, Cisco, Hanes Brands, and Rackspace to name of a few of the firms that were breached despite having great people, policies, and tools. In all of these instances, their legacy MFA was defeated. These incidents are hard evidence that legacy MFA is no longer effective against today’s sophisticated attacks.

If your organization still relies on passwords, SMS codes, or authenticator apps to protect employee logins, it’s not a matter of if you’ll be breached—it’s when.

From the perspective of someone responsible for securing an enterprise organization, the inclusion of biometric recognition capabilities in PCs and phones has been a positive development. The draw of using biometrics for recognition is that most are suitably unique and entropic, such that the biometric will more secure than a short passcode or easily-remembered password. Furthermore, biometric verification systems are viewed by most as being intuitive and convenient to use. In this way, biometric verification as the way users authenticate themselves to their devices has reduced a large attack surface for organizations whose employees work remotely or in hybrid environments. At first glance, one biometric authenticator may seem as secure as another. Users might feel secure using the fingerprint scanner on their Windows laptop, and the experience may be similar across different devices. However, the security and effectiveness of biometric systems vary significantly. This blog will explore the differences between fingerprint authentication built into popular PCs and next-generation biometric multifactor authenticators, highlighting vulnerabilities and how advanced solutions, such as these, provide the expected security and convenience.