We All Need To Get Serious About Protecting Company Data With Hardened, Multi-Factor Authentication

The world is becoming a less and less secure place due to the plethora of hacks that have happened over the course of the past few years. Companies like Sony, T-Mobile, Anthem, Target and their customers have been victims of countless cyber-attacks that resulted in many people’s information being compromised.

These breaches have become almost somewhat normal in terms of day to day news, but companies really need to start to protecting themselves better against these threats and one of the best ways to do. One of the most effective ways of preventing stolen login information from being used against a company is through the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA). We have written a more detailedpaper here if you want a deeper dive.

Hundreds of millions of users have seen their account data compromised as a result of major breaches in the past few years and the speed and size of breaches is only increasing. Companies are being compromised due to a multitude of reasons, however many of these attacks occur remotely after a 3rd party has their credentials compromised and their credentials are used to access a company’s systems in order to gain access to their entire network. In the case of a company like Target, the company’s board of directors asked for their CIO and CEO to resign as a consequence of their reaction to the biggest breach in the company’s history.

With more millennials entering the workforce, which we wrote about here, there are more computers and other endpoints like tablets and smartphones traveling around with their users. As a result, the risk to companies having their networks be compromised due to an external threat thanks to stolen credentials is greater than it has ever been before. Thankfully, there are new operating systems like Windows 10 that are inherently designed with security in mind and focus heavily on maintaining a trusted and secure computing environment for both users and enterprises. One of the biggest features of Microsoft Windows 10 that enables it to be so secure is its ability to natively support multi-factor authentication and to transmit it securely.

One of the best ways that an enterprise can take advantage of multi-factor authentication is to deploy a system with hardenedmulti-factor authentication. One example of this is Intel’s new Authenticate platform, which I wrote a lot about here at Intel’s 6th Generation Core vPro Processors announcement. This platform takes advantage of biometric technologies like fingerprint sensors and ensures that they are hardened against attacks and that their usage is heavily protected against external threats. This platform in combination with Windows 10 and the right network security policies should help almost any enterprise to more safely protect itself against external attacks and unauthorized network access using compromised credentials. PCs that are still running single-factor authentication are now a vulnerability as they now become an easier point of attack for attackers.

Tom Garrison, VP and GM of Business Client s presenting at Intel vPro event earlier this year

While no client platform can guarantee identity security, this is the best one I have seen so far. The stakes have never been higher as it’s not just the company and customers who are impacted but employees of the hacked company. Senior management is now getting fired as company boards are now realizing that their companies decided not to adequately protect their businesses. Just check out what happened at Target. CEO and CIO out.

If you’d like to read more about the current enterprise security threats and how hardened, multi-factor authentication helps make PCs part of the security solution, please click here to read our paper.

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