Between 2007 to 2012, Nasdaq, Visa, J.C. Penney and several other companies fell victim to five men guilty of hacking and credit card fraud totalling more US$ 300 million— the biggest cyber-crime case in U.S. history.
If that’s not scary enough, the statistics below, courtesy of Symantec, paint a vivid picture on the epidemic that is hacking:
- Around US$ 1 trillion dollars of intellectual property was stolen in 2008 alone from hackers accessing confidential data stored on enterprise systems worldwide.
- Over 232.4 million identities were exposed overall in 2011.
- The first half of 2013 has already experienced 255 incidents of hacking, exposing over 6.2 million records.
Furthermore, IT, Healthcare and Computer Software industries accounted for 93 percent of the total number of identities stolen in 2011. With every passing year, hackers are finding out more advanced ways to gain access to companies in these industries and the results are disastrous. That being said, many hackers are able to gain access to secured data not because of cutting-edge thievery, but because of the easy-to-crack authentication processes used by many companies.
For instance, Facebook, Google and Twitter and countless other websites all use one-factor authentication, where users input a username and password to access their accounts. While these companies do have considerably higher security for their data servers, hackers only need to crack a user’s password to access their account which can take as little as 10 minutes with proper software.
Enter Multi-Factor Authentication, which uses a combination of different elements to verify a user’s identity. The most common forms being Two-Factor and Three-Factor authentication:
Two-Factor requires:
- “Something only the user knows” (like a username/password combination)
- “Something only the user has” (like a one-time password (OTP) or and Out of Band (OOB) soft token.
Three-Factor uses the above elements while also requiring “something the user is”, like fingerprints or voice identification to increase authentication.
The fact is, hacking is inevitable in today’s high-tech world which is why more and more companies are rapidly adopting multi-factor means of authenticating users which is driving market growth at a CAGR of over 19 percent for the 2012-2016 period.
As you can see, a multi-factor authentication system provide more security and is less susceptible to security threats because hackers must go through stages of authentication, some of which, like fingerprint or voice identification, cannot be faked.
Nevertheless, even though multi-factor authentication systems vastly improve security, they are still not 100 percent accurate as vendors have only designed solutions to combat some forms of hacking. That being said, at the time being, multi-factor authentication solutions are the best way to secure data against remote attackers. With more and more end-users working remotely every day, this is very good news for vendors and will surely help add to the Multi-Factor Authentication Market’s future growth.
Furthermore, vendors conduct a number of trial runs before introducing multi-factor solutions into the market to ensure a low error rate and high accuracy. Therefore, vendors are constantly improving their products to provide more effective and accurate multi-factor authentication solutions to combat new and existing hacking methods, which will work to improve security even further and keep companies coming back for more.
For more information, view our 2012-2016 Global Multi-Factor Authentication report.
