The recent breach of the popular mobile app Timehop was caused by hackers breaching the app. It then exposed the credentials, phone numbers and social media histories of more than 21 million users. There was also a considerable length of time that the hacker’s presence went undetected.   This article about hackers, authored by David Vergara, Director of Product Marketing at OneSpan, first appeared July 24, 2018 on Payments Source.   It’s remarkable just how many significant security breaches could have been prevented if only multifactor authentication technology had been deployed. A lack of strong authentication is the reason behind the recent breach of the popular mobile app Timehop, which lets users see social media posts from the same date in previous years. The breach exposed the credentials, phone numbers and social media histories of more than 21 million users. What’s worse is there’s a considerable length of time that the hacker’s presence went undetected, making this application’s user identities ripe for theft. Here’s what happened. A Timehop employee’s credentials were leaked, which gave a hacker access to their system. The use of strong authentication, multifactor authentication in particular, would have required the hacker provide a second form of authentication beyond a username and password. A failure of the secondary authentication would have stopped the hacker cold.

Making Multifactor Authentication a Business Priority

Still haven’t deployed strong security in the form of multifactor authentication? It’s high time to get started by choosing a solution that’s right for your organization and your end users. Multifactor authentication is a must along with complementary technologies like single sign-on, user directories and other systems that allow for strong authentication and protect social media, email communications and business-critical applications. It’s easy to point the finger at a company’s IT department and say, “Why didn’t we have this stronger security?” As mentioned on Payments Source, the answer is sometimes simple — companies are confused about which technology to use, these tools were never intended to be used together, and integration can become expensive and cumbersome. Today, the right level of security requires additional technologies to keep up with the emerging threat vectors. All of this points to the urgent need for businesses to implement multifactor authentication and a risk-based approach to access management. The IBM Security report also found that one major factor impacting the cost of a data breach in the U.S. was the reported cost of lost business, which was $4.2 million, more than the total average cost of a breach globally, and more than double the amount of “lost business costs” of any other region surveyed. Make adding an MFA solution a priority. Your customers’ experience, brand reputation and bottom line depend on it.

Protect your infrastructure from hackers

To find out more about improving your company security and protecting your systems from hackers visit our network security page or contact us for a free IT security assessment

In computing and networks, a firewall is software, hardware or firmware (which is permanent software programmed into a read-only memory.) that follows a specific set of rules to decide whether to allow information or data to enter or leave a network. Firewalls have been a crucial defence in network security for over 25 years. They are a virtual barrier between sources that are checked and trusted, and untrusted sources that come from outside an internal network. Firewalls can be used for a wide range of devices and systems to lower the risk of malicious data travelling to and from the device. The term firewall is a metaphor relating to a wall or partition designed to inhibit or prevent the spread of fire. The most common ones you see are fire doors in a commercial building or school. There are two main types of computing firewall; network based and host based. Host-based means it's installed on individual servers and monitors signals going in and out. A network-based firewall is held in the cloud as a virtual firewall. When you're looking at firewalls, you'll come across some various terms within those host and network-based firewalls; proxy, stateful inspection, unified threat management (UTM), next-generation firewall (NGFW) and Threat focussed NGFW.   Why do you need a firewall? Firewalls are just the first line in the defence against hacks and malicious intent. In the same way that you lock your doors and windows before leaving the house, your firewall locks out unwanted intruders and makes you much less vulnerable to hackers who want to access your data or imitate your company (also known as spoofing). Some of the most common attacks are IP spoofing, network packet sniffers, man-in-the-middle attacks, distribution of sensitive internal information to external sources and password attacks. Password attacks can be achieved via password guessing (like you see in the movies), brute force login (where a programme guesses at a much higher rate per second but can often crash a system due to the resources required to cope with the constant attack) and password cracking (where the attacker gains access to the file on a computer that stores your passwords). The results of not having adequate firewall protection can be minor or devastating. Sometimes the downtime alone is the most costly part of the disruption, but other outcomes can be damage to a company's reputation or loss of crucial information. Talk to us about the best firewalls and security for your organisation – get your free consultation via our contact page.

Ransomware isn't exactly a new threat, and it continues to grow over recent years as a means for cyber criminals to extort individuals or businesses by way of locking down their devices and - you guessed it - essentially demanding a ransom for it to be unlocked. With reports of ransomware being more widespread as far back as 2015, you'd think by now it would have been dealt with more efficiently, however, according to research ransomware generated an estimated $1 billion in 2016 alone.  It also has a low cost structure (so, very profitable) and the victim directly sends the perpetrator money.