Podchats For FutureCISO: The Future State Of Passwordless Authentication
FutureCIO, Wednesday, November 29,2023
Clifford Stoll, author of The Cuckoo's Egg, an investigation into the hacking of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that led to the capture of hacker Marcus Hess, famously said: 'Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anyone else use it and get a new one every six months.'
The paper, How Effective is Multifactor Authentication (MFA) at Deterring Cyberattacks? concludes that implementing MFA leads to a 99.22% reduction in the risk of compromise across the entire population and a 98.56% reduction even in cases where credentials have been leaked.
To be clear, MFAs can be hacked. Roger Grimes, the defence evangelist at KnowBe4, published a 41-page ebook in which he details over 12 ways to hack MFA but that's for another podchat.