Use It or Lose It: Adopt MFA to Effectively and Easily Stop Cyber Attacks
The use of MFA is one of the most effective and least expensive ways to enhance user-level security against the growing risks of cyberattacks.
Your business is under attack. The attackers are constantly gaining in their effectiveness and the sophistication of the weapons they use. There is not a company in the world whose online portals are not attacked hundreds of times – each hour. Cyber attacks are one of the single greatest threats to businesses today.
This assessment by one of the leading providers of cyber attack insurance goes on to forecast the demand for such insurance will grow from $5 billion today to $20 billion in premium in just the next five years. That estimate underlines the growing reality of this threat and the damage it brings when successful.
Top Baltimore IT service organizations offering insights into using multi-factor authentication to stop cyber attacks.
The Insurance You Can’t Do Without
David Shaffer, owner of Baltimore IT company, Tier One Technology Partners offers this advice on why multi-factor authentication is a perfect addition to a company’s IT solution stack.
It may make sense for your company to add cyber insurance to your disaster planning. There is no question, however, that one of the least expensive and most effective insurance policies you can take out is Multi-Factor Authentication. This approach provides security at the individual-user level to protect your organization from the pervasiveness of cyberattacks.
No matter how much your organization invests in building multiple levels of security, that investment of capital and resources is easily nullified when users open the door. If a user falls prey to an attack, they provide the attacker a foothold within your organization.
What MFA Is: Personalizing Security
The concept for the use of MFA is based on providing security by requiring validation of two or more factors known only to an individual user. Combining these multiple factors adds a powerful level of security at the user interface with your system, internal and external.
The factors, or characteristics, an MFA application utilizes will include one or more of:
- What the user possesses, such as a password
- What the user knows, such as a one-time code sent by text or other methods
- Who the user is, as shown by a fingerprint or other biometric factor
Keith Marchiano, Director of IT with Kyocera Intelligence, a tech services company in the Baltimore/Washington metro area says “Creating compromised credentials is the goal of all phishing attacks and many other black hat attacks. It is the source of the most successful breaches. A password is easily stolen, guessed or cracked with sophisticated software tools. When the multi-factors are added, it negates the potential damage from that exposed password.”
Multi-Factor Authentication is Easy to Implement
The importance of MFA is highlighted by the fact that Microsoft now makes it painless to implement in all organizations using Office 365. The company offers a free version of MFA from Azure, and it provides full support for the application.
Scott Clarke with Menark Technologies, a Philadelphia IT services company says “with a purposeful dismissal of “old-school” single-factor authentication, Microsoft and other industry leaders label this new capability as “Modern Authentication.” The use of MFA is just one element in Exchange Online to provides multiple methods for achieving added security.”
Since August 2017, all users of Office 365 with a Skype for Business function have Modern Authentication enabled as a default. There is a specific protocol for checking and modifying the Modern Authentication settings, as discussed in documentation from Microsoft for enabling MFA.
It is seldom insurance so effective comes with so little cost.
Stuart Crawford serves as Managing Partner with Ulistic LP, a specialty MSP Marketing firm focused on information technology marketing and business development. He brings a wealth of knowledge and experience pertaining to how technology business owners and IT firms can use marketing as a vehicle to obtain success.
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