Authentication is one of the hottest topics in cybersecurity right now. As biometrics, MFA, and a range of other authentication methods continue to threaten the password’s supremacy, we thought it was worth finding out what industry professionals thought about it all.

So that’s what we did. At InfoSecurity Europe 2022, One Identity surveyed more than 100 security and IT professionals to get a picture of how businesses and their employees approach passwords and authentication.

When asked what they consider the biggest security threat to their business and 56 percent of respondents said they believed it to be users sharing passwords for admin tasks. If that isn’t an argument for passwordless authentication, we’re not sure what is. This was followed by 25 percent of respondents believing that the biggest security threat was users clicking on malicious links or opening rogue attachments. Collectively, this means that 80 percent of respondents believe that human error poses the largest threat to an organization’s security.

Interestingly, while the majority (62 percent) viewed educating staff as the most important factor in preventing cyber-attacks, a rapidly growing segment (30 percent) stated that adopting a zero-trust model was more important.

Moving on to multifactor authentication, we are met with some heartening statistics. 99 percent of respondents told us that their company had adopted MFA for remote access and 97 percent said that it was mandated. This confirms what we already knew – that the password as a standalone authentication method is obsolete.

When looking into users’ connections to passwords, we see some interesting results. While just over a quarter of respondents had an emotional connection to a password (28 percent), the majority said they had a favorite password (84 percent). We can infer from this that while most people don’t reuse passwords for sentimental reasons, they likely do for practical reasons. It is concerning that IT and security professionals, people who are more aware than anyone of the dangers of reusing passwords, persist in this bad habit.

This is yet another mark against the use of traditional passwords – if those in the know aren’t following best practices, how can we expect the layman to? The reality is modern users have so many accounts that it is no longer practical to create and remember a new password for everyone they set up. We’ll chalk this one up as another point in support of modern authentication methods, which eliminate these problems.

While it’s clear that users are reusing passwords, it turns out that most respondents are at least adding complexity to their passwords depending on a system’s importance (96 percent). Perhaps unsurprisingly, 76 percent saw banking or financial services as requiring a top tier password, but only 7 percent thought that work emails were deserving of the same protection. This may be an understandable perspective but doesn’t bode well for organizations that routinely share sensitive information through email.

Finally, we make it to how IT and security professionals are storing their passwords. Here, at least, we get some more heartening statistics:

• 65 percent of respondents said they used passwords managers, which is generally regarded as the safest and most convenient way to keep passwords
• 23 percent said they wrote their login details down somewhere, which, while not ideal, is safer than using one password across multiple accounts

We did, apparently, come across some cyber-savants claiming they could remember all their login details, but if anything, this suggests that they are reusing passwords for an alarming number of accounts.

The key takeaway here is that the password is on the way out. These results serve as further proof that traditional passwords by themselves are no longer fit for purpose – even leaders in the IT security space fail to follow best practices simply because it isn’t convenient. We’ve seen that businesses are implementing and mandating alternative authentication methods en masse, and it won’t be long before this trend trickles down to the rest of society.

The post Guest blog: The death throes of the password? Key takeaways from the One Identity Infosecurity Europe survey appeared first on IT Security Guru.

Driven by digital innovation, business operations have undergone a fundamental transformation over the past decade. And as businesses have moved forward, the fundamentals of cybersecurity have followed behind: What are the weak points in my security strategy? Who are the main threats to my operations? Where am I at risk of compromise? As the shift to a digital marketplace has gathered speed, so has the potential for exposure and the price of failing to secure key assets. The Internet of Things (IoT) is of particular concern in this sense, as it threatens to broaden attack surfaces across the board, especially in the industrial space.

Despite an ever-evolving threat landscape, many organisations remain fundamentally reactive, responding at the point of compromise rather than leveraging real-time intelligence to profile threats as they develop. This is unsustainable. By 2020 it is expected that 25% of cyberattacks will target IoT devices, many of which will be deployed across critical industrial environments. Data breaches have also increased year on year, and the total cost of cybercrime is set to exceed £4.2 trillion per annum by 2021. The time has come for the old approach to change. The requisite experience, knowledge and solutions now exist for cyber threat intelligence to ‘change the game’.  Here’s how:

Shift the mindset and expand the viewpoint

The first step is to switch from a reactive stance to a proactive approach. Playing catch-up is always a sub-optimal outcome, not least because it leaves barely any resources for planning, meaning that the next big problem is often a surprise. To build on an existing security posture it’s vital to stay up-to-date, profile potential threats and evolve processes and strategies pre-emptively. While cyber vendors are often questioned and tested on their ability to deliver ‘actionable intelligence’, the reality is that many organisations don’t have any processes in place to action intelligence. Evolving intelligence needs cannot be met by the important but insufficient practice of simply adding malicious IP-addresses and other indicators of compromise to a SIEM-system or a TIP.  The need for a more holistic approach to threat intelligence, beyond the technical parameters, is widely accepted, yet the traditional IT security industry is struggling to meet demand because they have hardly any experience speaking to the “why?” behind an attack. Finding unstructured insights in social media, paste sites, forums and similar sources from both the surface web and deep/dark web requires companies to turn to different intelligence solutions that are complementary to their existing threat intelligence tools.

Use the data that’s there

Excluding certain, specialised sources, access to data has never been easier. From a security perspective this is both a good thing and a serious concern. An openly available report on a vulnerability today could be leveraged to create the exploit of choice tomorrow, while a single, misplaced password or private key can lead to a devastating breach and huge losses. There is, however, also great potential for spotting emergent threats and transcending the catch-up game that consumes the time of analysts and researchers. The key is to recognise that intelligence is as likely to come from soft data as it is from structured threat information. Making the most of open sources involves processing the data, understanding its relevance to a certain use-case, and then acting on those findings before others do.

Support human analysis with automation

A 2018 SANS survey on the use of cyber threat intelligence noted that, as expected, most organisations are using a wide variety of external data sources, including public feeds, information sharing groups and security vendor reporting. More and more organisations are also recognising that broad attacker trends (76%) and information on vulnerability exploitation (79%) are essential for maintaining situational awareness. However, much of the analysis and intelligence ‘fusion’ taking place is still done manually, with a shortage of skills acting as a major impediment to properly utilising cyber threat intelligence. IOC feeds aren’t enough anymore; if problem is context, the solution is people, and automation, because collecting, processing and reporting on the amount of data in question is simply not human-scalable. Especially when it needs to be done at pace. Furthermore, not all organisations are looking for the same kind of intelligence. In our modern, interconnected world, cybersecurity concerns blend seamlessly into reputational risk and physical security. With no one-size-fits all solution, customisability is king and analysts need a tool that allows them to decide what kind of intelligence will enhance and protect their businesses.

This is what we mean by “changing the game”; altering an existing approach, based on appropriate investment in available technology and utilisation of existing resources. Intelligence platforms do the heavy lifting required to process, slice and visualise massive quantities of data in short order, allowing analysts to create contextually relevant and timely intelligence on a case-by-case basis. The truth is that cyber threats cannot be eliminated – but they can be mitigated, provided that the information is out there, and someone is looking.

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• Automated syncing of HR directories such as Workday, UltiPro, and Namely, which are the source of truth for employee status, and IT directories such as Active Directory and LDAP, which often control access to applications.
• Automated deprovisioning of employees from applications that have an application programming interface (API) for user management. Most “birthright” applications that are widely used in companies, such as Office365 and G Suite, have these APIs.
• Automatic checklist generation for IT admins, to ensure that they manually deprovision all ex-employees from all apps. Most applications don’t yet have an automated deprovisioning API and require manual intervention from IT.
• Application access events sent to SIEM systems, to double-check that no ex-employees are accessing applications.

IT and HR can work collaboratively to fully deprovision all employees. If these steps are carried out correctly, a business can be safe in the knowledge that precautionary measures have been taken to protect confidential data from a departing employee.

Alvaro Hoyos, CISO at OneLogin

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