Importance of Multi-factor Authentication during remote work
We
all know how the corona virus has impacted our life - economically,
personally, and professionally. The virus has forced us to change the
way we live and work. Most of us moved back to our native place, and
almost all of us are working from home. We are now far away from the
safe and secured office space. This stirs up the need for a better and
safe way of accessing our company’s data and services.
Experts
point out that the proportion of cyber attacks on people working
remotely has increased exponentially between April and August. These
attacks are targeted towards businessmen and employees of big
organizations so that they can extort a hefty ransom. Attackers are
exploiting the chaos caused by COVID-19, which shifted major portions of
IT related works to the employees’ home. It is imperative that we all
must enforce an extra layer of security for our home networks and all of
our online accounts.
How to prevent such security incidents
The
first step that everyone must do is to check whether the anti-virus
software installed on our computer is up-to-date. We should keep
ourselves away from visiting websites that are not protected by https
and avoid downloading files from such unsecured websites. Security
experts point out that attackers are increasingly employing social
engineering tactics to lure innocent employees of large organizations. Recently Twitter employees suffered such an attack from hackers causing fake tweets being tweeted from many official Twitter accounts.
What are all the major causes of security breaches?
Apart
from using a less secured network and outdated anti-virus software,
there is one major factor that results in many security breaches - weak
passwords. According to Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR),
nearly 80% of security breaches are tied to passwords. Accounts that
are protected by passwords alone have very high chances of getting
breached, and that’s why most organizations have mandated their users to
use additional layers of verification besides passwords.
How Zoho is tackling these cyber threats
In Zoho, we have an organization policy that mandates multi-factor authentication for our employees via OneAuth, an in-house authenticator application for their organization account. For our users,
passwords will be cross-checked with the publicly available breached
passwords list during sign-up, to prevent them from using an exposed
password that might put their account at risk. Also, we constantly
remind our users to enable MFA to improve their account security. Download OneAuth to secure your Zoho account via multi-factor authentication and prevent any security breaches in future.
(Zoho has never faced any security-related issues, and the data you have
stored with us is completely safe. We also do not sell your data to
anyone.)
Topic Participants
Kaavian Sivam
Sticky Posts
Deprecation of SMS-based multi-factor authentication (MFA) mode
Overview of SMS-based OTP MFA mode The SMS-based OTP MFA method involves the delivery of a one-time password to a user's mobile phone via SMS. The user receives the OTP on their mobile phone and enters it to sign into their account. SMS-based OTPs offer