Is Multi Factor Authentication Effective and Secure?

The use of MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) has considerably raised according to a survey in 2016. The hike also indicates that the people are well aware of cyber security threats and breaches.More than 30% of organizations are looking forward to implementing MFA in 2017.According to CTO of SecureAuth, “Using a second-factor can be a deterrent but not enough to protect against attacks, and organizations must evolve their methods to protect critical points of access such as Single Sign-On (SSO) portals and the VPN,”.  Organizations can execute adaptive access authentication, which eliminates the cyber threat and produce an outstanding user experience.  Transparent techniques, such as device recognition, geo-location, the use of threat services, and even behavioral biometrics are the latest advances in adaptive authentication.Large - scale organizations with 2500 employees and above have been found implementing MFA at a higher frequency rate. Certain findings show that 63% are making use of MFA and 21% preferring adaptive authentication instead of former 2FA (two - factor authentication). It was also interesting to see that medium sized business ventures ( 250 - 2499 employees) are the most interested in MFA in 2017. However, on the other side, small-scale organizations with 250 or fewer employees are unlikely to make use of MFA. A few percentage of them do not use any form of MFA, nor they have any plans to adopt in the future.The study also focussed on public awareness and found that 82% of respondents expressed their concern on misuse and exploitation of stolen valid and precious credentials/ data that makes a way through to get into organization’s assets and information. It is a genuine concern as one of the common methods attackers use to get access is through stolen usernames and passwords.“It goes hand-in-hand that the increased implementation of multi-factor authentication and growing interest in expanding its use within organizations is driven by the top concern of misuse of stolen credentials,” said CTO of SecureAuth. While the public is very well aware of cyber security threats, the greatest challenge organizations face is the funding to pump in for all cybersecurity-related implementations. Many Organizations across the globe has planned to increase the funding in 2017 expecting a safe journey through the internet.