protecting-pword

Is It Time to Ditch the Passwords for More Secure Passkeys?

by ComplianceSecurity

Passwords are the most used method of authentication, but they are also one of the weakest. Passwords are often easy to guess or steal. Also, many people use the same password across several accounts. This makes them vulnerable to cyber-attacks. The sheer volume of passwords that people need to remember is large. This leads to habits that make it easier for criminals to breach passwords. Such as creating weak passwords and storing passwords in a non-secure way. 61% of all data breaches involve stolen or hacked login credentials. In recent years a better solution has emerged – passkeys. Passkeys are more secure than passwords. They also provide a more convenient way of logging into your accounts.

What is Passkey Authentication?

Passkeys work by generating a unique code for each login attempt. This code is then validated by the server. This code is created using a combination of information about the user and the device they are using to log in. You can think of passkeys as a digital credential. A passkey allows someone to authenticate in a web service or a cloud-based account. There is no need to enter a username and password. This authentication technology leverages Web Authentication (WebAuthn). This is a core component of FIDO2, an authentication protocol. Instead of using a unique password, it uses public-key cryptography for user verification. The user’s device stores the authentication key. This can be a computer, mobile device, or security key device. It is then used by sites that have passkeys enabled to log the user in.

Advantages of Using Passkeys Instead of Passwords

More Secure

One advantage of passkeys is that they are more secure than passwords. Passkeys are more difficult to hack. This is true especially if the key generates from a combination of biometric and device data. Biometric data can include things like facial recognition or fingerprint scans. Device information can include things like the device’s MAC address or location. This makes it much harder for hackers to gain access to your accounts.

More Convenient

Another advantage of passkeys over passwords is that they are more convenient. With password authentication, users often must remember many complex passwords. This can be difficult and time-consuming. Forgetting passwords is common and doing a reset can slow an employee down. Each time a person has to reset their password, it takes an average of three minutes and 46 seconds. Passkeys erase this problem by providing a single code. You can use that same code across all your accounts. This makes it much easier to log in to your accounts. It also reduces the likelihood of forgetting or misplacing your password.

Phishing-Resistant

Credential phishing scams are prevalent. Scammers send emails that tell a user something is wrong with their account. They click on a link that takes them to a disguised login page created to steal their username and password. When a user is authenticating with a passkey instead, this won’t work on them. Even if a hacker had a user’s password, it wouldn’t matter. They would need the device passkey authentication to breach the account.

Are There Any Disadvantages to Using Passkeys?

Passkeys are definitely looking like the future of authentication technology. But there are some issues that you may run into when adopting them right now.

Passkeys Aren’t Yet Widely Adopted

One of the main disadvantages is that passkeys are not yet widely adopted. Many websites and cloud services still rely on passwords. They don’t have passkey capability yet. This means that users may have to continue using passwords for some accounts. At least until passkeys become more widely adopted. It could be slightly awkward to use passkeys for some accounts and passwords for others.

Passkeys Need Extra Hardware & Software

One thing about passwords is that they’re free and easy to use. You simply make them up as you sign up for a site. Passkeys need extra hardware and software to generate and validate the codes. This can be costly for businesses to put in place at first. But there is potential savings from improved security and user experience. These benefits can outweigh the cost of passkeys.

Prepare Now for the Future of Authentication

Passkeys are a more secure and convenient alternative to passwords. They are more difficult to hack, and they provide a more convenient way of logging into your accounts. But passkeys are not yet widely adopted. Additionally, businesses may need to budget for implementation. Despite these challenges, passkeys represent a promising solution. Specifically, to the problem of weak passwords. They have the potential to improve cybersecurity. As well as boost productivity for businesses and individuals alike.

Need Help Improving Your Identity & Account Security?

Take advantage of the new passkey authentication by exploring it now. It’s the perfect time to ease in and begin putting it in place for your organization. Give us a call today to schedule a consultation. Article used with permission from The Technology Press.

Compliance-Governance

Required Data Security Controls for Compliance

by Compliance

No data protection regulation anywhere in the world expects your business to have a 100 percent perfect plan for fighting cybersecurity threats. However, your business is definitely expected to install all the necessary checks and balances that make up a resilient defense. These checks and balances are referred to as data security controls or measures.

Should your business ever undergo a security breach and you fail to produce satisfactory evidence about undertaking preventive data security measures, you could find yourself in serious trouble. Two of the most common consequences you could face would be your cyber insurance provider’s refusal to pay for damages and a regulatory body initiating punitive action against your business.

This short read will introduce you to the types of data security measures, the ones you must undertake immediately and why the time to act is now.

Understanding Data Security Controls
Data security controls are aimed towards reducing threats to sensitive and mission-critical data by following data security best practices and enforcing robust policies. These controls or measures can be largely divided into four categories:

• Operational Controls: Procedures, rules and other mechanisms aimed at protecting systems and applications.
• Technical Controls: Safeguards installed within the information systems to enforce data security policies. For example, the act of authenticating every login with two-factor or multifactor authentication.
• Administrative Controls: Policies and procedures ensuring that data security standards are followed. For example, a policy stating how the data will ideally be shared with third parties and the penalties for any violations.
• Architectural Controls: Steps focused on how an organization’s technology assets, such as endpoints, devices and storages, are connected to each other. For example, vulnerability assessments to detect weak spots in a network’s architecture.

Several compliance regulations highlight the importance of such controls and often list down the kind of measures a business must undertake to demonstrate full compliance. For example, the Security Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) lists down the administrative, physical and technical safeguards needed to secure the integrity of Protected Health Information (PHI). Any business mandated to comply with HIPAA, that fails to produce documented evidence of the existence of these safeguards, faces punitive action for non-compliance.

If you have kept the idea of implementing these measures on the backburner until now, it’s high time you reconsider your stance and attend to it proactively. Not doing so can prove to be very costly, especially in today’s threat landscape, which has only worsened tenfold due to the pandemic.

Remote Work = More Security Concerns = Greater Need for Compliance
Any business knows how challenging it is to protect remote devices (and users) from looming security threats. The year 2020 saw this challenge quadruple, with remote work increasing at an unprecedented rate. A Gartner report stated that 88 percent of businesses worldwide mandated or encouraged all their employees to work remotely from their homes once COVID-19 was declared a pandemic.

It is important to remember that compliance requirements apply to remote devices on your business’ network as well. And with the rise in the number of remote devices, it is vital to chalk out a meticulous strategy to implement suitable data security measures to make your business resilient to cybersecurity threats. If you’re wondering what these measures are, keep reading.

Data Security Controls You Must Implement
While it’s understandable that implementing certain policies and procedures can be a long and tiring effort, listed below are some of the data security measures and best practices you can start with:

• Asset Discovery and Management: Ensuring every single information asset and device on your network is accounted for and managed.
• Identity and Access Management (IAM): Efforts undertaken to define, maintain and authenticate access to your network, especially from remote users, to avoid any unauthorized access.
• Data Discovery and Classification: Discovering and documenting the type of data your business collects, where it is stored and how it is processed, to determine a risk matrix.
• Ongoing Risk Management: The act of gauging the risks your business data faces on a regular basis, including third-party risks, and carrying out remediation efforts proactively.
• Protection Against Threats: Deploying the necessary technology to build a solid defense against various threats.
• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: Acquiring robust tools to back up and recover data following an unsavory incident and testing them regularly.
• Incident Response Plan (IRP): A comprehensive plan to identify a security incident, contain it, notify your clients/customers about it, recover from it and document learnings from it.

You don’t have to take on this journey alone. Leveraging expertise and experience can help you carry out the process both efficiently and effectively. Drop us a ‘hello’ over an email and we can start the process.

Steps-to-Compliance

First Step to Compliance: A Thorough and Accurate Risk Assessment

by Compliance

Complying with data privacy and protection regulations wouldn’t give several business owners sleepless nights if it only meant installing a predefined list of security solutions.

Compliance goes way beyond this and for good reason. In principle, regulators, local or international, want businesses to:

• assess the type of data they store and manage
• gauge the potential risks the data is exposed to
• list down the remediation efforts needed to mitigate the risks
• undertake necessary remediation efforts regularly
• and most importantly, document every single step of this seemingly arduous process as evidence

Each of the above steps are mandatory and non-negotiable. A closer look will tell you that installing a list of expensive security solutions comes only after the first three steps in the process have been followed. Skipping past these initial steps and acting merely on presumptuous knowledge is tantamount to leaving your business’ future to sheer chance. It’s anyone’s guess what that would lead to.

That’s why we’re going to explain to you why a thorough and accurate risk assessment is truly the first step towards achieving compliance. Moreover, when repeated regularly, it can help you demonstrate continuous compliance while keeping cyberthreats at bay.

Security Risk Assessments Unearth Crucial Insights

A thorough and accurate risk assessment can unearth a host of crucial insights from even the deepest and darkest alleys of your IT environment to ultimately empower your decision making. Having actionable insights at your disposal can help you build strategies to reduce risk levels in practical ways instead of shooting in the dark by testing various tools.

Here are some of the most important details that become more apparent and unambiguous with every risk assessment.

Baseline of the System
A risk assessment helps you chart out the lifecycle of all data that is collected, stored and managed in your entire network.

Identification of Threats
A meticulous risk assessment identifies all the possible threats, such as intentional, unintentional, technical, non-technical and structural, that your business data is exposed to.

Identification of Vulnerabilities
With each assessment, you get the latest list of vulnerabilities prevalent in your network with respect to patches, policies, procedures, software, equipment and more.

Current Status of Existing Controls
From the assessment report, you can also understand the existing security and privacy controls protecting your business against vulnerabilities.

Probability of Impact
An accurate assessment report is fully capable of anticipating the probability of a threat that might exploit one of your network’s existing vulnerabilities.

Strength of Impact
Risk assessment also helps you gauge the possible impact of any threat hitting your business.

Imagine how easy it would be for you to build and implement a strategy to fix the security loopholes in your business while maintaining a well-documented record of your efforts.

Why Risk Assessment Is Needed for Compliance

While assessing whether you did everything in your capacity to ensure full compliance with the regulations, you also need to keep in mind that a regulator seeks evidence of compliance – documented reports. Besides helping you chart a successful path to compliance, a thorough risk assessment adds great weightage to demonstrating evidence of compliance. When you present the risk assessment reports along with other documentation, you demonstrate how your business carried out due diligence in upholding principles of data privacy and protection.

Please remember that no regulator expects you to have a fail-safe strategy. What matters is uncompromising intent, informed action and undeterred consistency. If you can demonstrate all this, you will most likely avoid any punitive action as well as a long list of problems could that surface afterwards.

Help Is Just a Conversation Away

Contrary to what is often claimed, there are no shortcuts to compliance or to any of the steps that lead to it. At the outset, achieving compliance might seem grueling. However, it isn’t as bad as it seems when due process and expert guidance is followed.

A conversation with us is all you need so we can help you walk through the complexities of risk assessment with diligent and customised guidance.