Security News

While MFA adoption and spending is on the rise, organizations are still unclear on best practices and methodologies, Yubico and 451 Research reveal. The findings show that MFA adoption and spending has increased within the enterprise due to a confluence of several factors: the growing recognition that stolen credentials and phishing attacks are at the root of most security breaches; the rise of work-from-home policies due to the COVID-19 pandemic; and the adoption of modern authentication standards such as Fast Identity Online U2F, FIDO2 and WebAuthn that underpin new advances in two-factor and passwordless authentication.

Ecessa announced it has added several advanced security features to its latest firmware release, version 12.0.0. These advanced features enhance Ecessa's next generation firewall capabilities integrated with each of its products and further secure the company's position in the Secure Access Service Edge marketplace.

Akamai Technologies announced the launch of Akamai MFA, a phish-proof solution designed to enable enterprises to quickly deploy FIDO2 multi-factor authentication without the need to deploy and manage hardware security keys. Akamai MFA uses a smartphone application that transforms existing smartphones into a hardware security key to deliver a frictionless user experience.

The Feds are warning that cybercriminals are bypassing multi-factor authentication and successfully attacking cloud services at various U.S. organizations. "These types of attacks frequently occurred when victim organizations' employees worked remotely and used a mixture of corporate laptops and personal devices to access their respective cloud services," the alert outlined.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said today that threat actors bypassed multi-factor authentication authentication protocols to compromise cloud service accounts. While threat actors tried gaining access to some of their targets' cloud assets via brute force attacks, they failed due to their inability to guess the correct credentials or because the attacked organization had MFA authentication enabled.

What if you lose your phone? Tom Merritt lists five additional ways to receive MFA codes, without SMS. Someone wrote in, after seeing my Top 5 about avoiding using SMS for multi-factor authentication, and asked, "Do you have any suggestions on how to protect myself from getting locked out of my accounts if my phone disappears or dies?" Great question. One advantage of SMS multi-factor authentication is that when you get your phone number on a new phone all the factors will get texted to you there.

Asigra software version 14.2 support for the Microsoft software suite empowers solution providers to significantly lower cybersecurity threats targeting backup repositories with MS Office 365 data. Asigra Cloud Backup with Deep MFA allows users to easily schedule the creation of point-in-time backup copies of mailboxes and corporate data residing in Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Online, Office 365 Groups, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business - with no limitations on data volumes or number of mailboxes.

As the list of known organizations compromised by way of the SolarWinds supply chain attack is slowly growing - according to Reuters, the attackers also breached U.S. Department of Homeland Security's systems, the State Department, and the National Institutes of Health - Microsoft has decided that its Defender Antivirus will start blocking/quarantining the known malicious SolarWinds binaries today - even if the process is running. As security researcher Vinoth Kumar pointed out, the attackers might have easily compromised the company's update server by using a password that was published on their public Github repository for over a year or, as several Reuters sources noted, they might have bought access to SolarWinds' computers through underground forums.

Using indicators of compromise made available by FireEye, threat intelligence and incident response firm Volexity determined that the threat group behind the SolarWinds hack targeted a U.S. think tank earlier this year, and it used a clever method to bypass multi-factor authentication and access emails. "At the time of the investigation, Volexity deduced that the likely infection was the result of the SolarWinds box on the target network; however, it was not fully understood exactly how the breach occurred, therefore Volexity was not in a position to report the circumstances surrounding the breach to SolarWinds," Volexity said.

Last year, Weinert noted that using any form of MFA is better than relying just on a password for security, as it "Significantly increases the costs for attackers, which is why the rate of compromise of accounts using any type of MFA is less than 0.1% of the general population." The SMS and voice formats aren't adaptable to user experience expectations, technical advances, and attacker behavior in real-time.