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MFA- Multi Factor Authentication

This article will help you to understand why Multi Factor Authentication( MFA )became an important architectural component in protecting us in the new Working From Home.

MFA & cybersecurity

Introduction

In the early days, Cybersecurity (then called IT Security or information security) used to be merely a username and password. If you ask to someone, they would say I have a username and password so I am safe. It wasn’t much of the internet at that time. Eventually, people have learned that password isn’t sufficient to protect their digital assets. So Antivirus (AV) software flourished and we saw a plethora of internet security solutions that revolve around AVs used to catch the known malicious code which was enough of a validation for the vendors. Again, fast forward a couple of years, and the internet became mainstream, and businesses along with consumers started to use the internet for many things and mainly emails and web browsing.

As businesses started using the internet for their emails and web, Firewalls became the solution to our cybersecurity issues. As it was for passwords and AVs.

What have we learned?

True we have a facelift as we learned from attackers where AVs became EDRs, passwords have their own managers and firewalls have Next Generation brand. This is not supposed to be a historical discussion of cybersecurity as we know it. However, 25 years have passed and we are still clung to passwords with cosmetic. The main point is that there is a correlation between going digital and the number of attacks happening.

MFA and COVID19

COVID-19 is a pandemic that opened our eyes to a lot of things, one thing that is within the context of this blog, is that working remotely comes with its own risks and we got to know by doing that password are not enough, and firewalls are not meant to protect us while we are out of office. Also read: The Latest Cyber Threats After the Recent Global Pandemic

That’s why Multifactor Authentication or MFA for short is becoming an important architectural component in protecting us in the new Working From Home (WFH). MFA is becoming what firewalls were in the internet era, the password, and AVs in the 80s.

MFA is not really a new concept, it has been there for a while, however, with the advent of mobile devices, it became mainstream.

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