FISMA report states two-factor authentication could have stopped 52% of incidents

admin
2015-05-04T12:58:00+00:00

Read the article in NextGov.

The FISMA report states that U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team incident reports "indicate that in FY 2013, 65 percent of federal civilian cybersecurity incidents were related to or could have been prevented by strong authentication implementation. This figure decreased 13 percent in FY 2014 to 52 percent of cyberincidents reported to US-CERT.”

I likes this analogy:

Let’s say a particular make of car gets broken into 70,000 times a year by thieves, and nearly a quarter of those attempts results in crooks making off with ID cards, ash-tray change or even the car itself. What if I told you better locks would prevent and deter more than half of those breaches? That’s precisely what strong authentication does. It’s not cheap, but in our analogy, neither is buying a new locking system that doesn't let everyone in.

Note that this is only the government space. Also, note that because of that two-factor authentication is more expensive for them (nothing reduces the vendor options available like a GSA schedule).

You can read the entire (pdf) report too.

And you can download the WiKID Strong Authentication Server today.