data security Archives | Page 2 of 3

Beware of Credential Stuffing

In recent times, you might have noticed user accounts being compromised by the millions, and yet companies refute these claims saying that their systems are secure and have not been attacked. In these cases, the companies are right – instead of a direct attack, the hackers may have performed an attack called ‘credential stuffing’. In this type of attack, hackers get their hands on usernames and passwords of one application or service and stuff the same credentials on another login for another digital provider.

For example, if you have used the same user ID and password for creating your Facebook and Twitter accounts, a hacker who has access to your Facebook user id and password can use the same for getting into your Twitter account. This does not mean that Twitter’s systems are faulty. It simply means that your credentials have been stuffed. Credential stuffing attacks use code injection techniques to test the credentials against multiple accounts like social media, online marketplaces, and bank accounts. Once access is gained, the hacker can get access to personal information, credit card information and other personally verifiable information.

In recent times, this type of attack has gained popularity due to the fact that most users use the same user ID and password for multiple accounts. The situation right now is precarious for most online users – a recent breach of breaches has given hackers access to a whopping 2.2 billion user IDs and passwords. It is called a ‘breach of breaches’ because a few hackers hacked into millions of Dropbox and LinkedIn accounts and compiled a list of plain text credentials. However, another team of hackers hacked into this list to compile an even bigger list of stolen credentials.

If you have built enterprise applications, how sure can you be that your users have created different passwords for all your applications? There is no way for you to know for sure. However, you could put in place a password policy which prevents them from using the same password for all the applications in your network.

Akku from CloudNow Technologies allows you to set custom password policies to help you standardize the passwords set by your users. You can also leverage it to prevent the setting of the same passwords. To know more, get in touch with us now.

Protect your Business from Privilege Abuse with IAM

Privilege abuse – that is the security threat that your business’s IT team is most worried about. According to a survey conducted in March 2014 among more than 4000 IT security executives, over 88% of them fear that users who have access to the organization’s applications and data are the ones who are most likely to compromise it and lead to a security breach.

Privilege abuse, or privileged user abuse, refers to the inappropriate or fraudulent use of permitted access to applications and data. This could be done, either maliciously, accidentally or through ignorance of policies. In addition to causing financial losses, such insider breaches also damage the organization’s reputation, sometimes irreparably.

Continue reading Protect your Business from Privilege Abuse with IAM

Working Online? Watch out for Identity Theft!

Identity theft is as real as your identity and as dangerous as the one who steals it. It occurs when an unauthorized person or entity uses your personal information to assume your identity and commit fraud and other criminal activities including stealing from you, or from others in your name.

What does an identity thief steal?

Your name, address, credit card or bank account information, and even information that might otherwise seem harmless, such as photographs, information about your family members or your date of birth could be used in harmful ways in the wrong hands.

How does identity theft happen?

Identity thieves are well-organized, tech-savvy, creative and have seemingly innocent online personalities. They can steal information, simply by requesting it from an unassuming person or by using technological attacks to capture millions of records from enterprises. Sometimes, a stolen wallet or a carelessly-thrown receipt or letter can also lead to identity theft.

Here are some of the ways in which an identity theft may take place in your organization:

Data Breaches

A data breach, accidental or malicious, can have a heavy cost on both the organization involved and the individuals whose data is compromised.

Improper security on company-owned devices or devices that have access to your organization’s data is one of the leading causes of data breaches that lead to identity theft.

Phishing

Phishing involves sending deceptive emails with links to malicious websites that may either request or steal your information. If one of your employees is manipulated by such an email and clicks on a link it provides, it can be dangerous to the organization itself.

Even if your organization’s email can manage to keep out such mails from employee inboxes, if your employee has access to their personal email at the workplace, they are at the risk of being compromised.

Public Wi-Fi Connections

One of the problems with allowing your employees to work remotely is the possibility that they may be working from places that offer open or free public wireless internet connectivity. A criminal who also has access to the same network could also be able to observe all of your employee’s activities.

Mishandled Passwords

Carelessness with passwords, whether in terms of the creation of weak passwords or the way they are stored, can make your employees and your organization susceptible to identity theft.

Read our blog on Everything You Need to Know about Secure Passwords to know more about keeping passwords safe.

How can you prevent identity theft?

When it comes to preventing identity theft, the first step to take is to sensitize your employees on the different ways in which it can happen. Studies have proven that employees are the preferred channels that identity thieves use when they target organizations.

From your end, you also need to:

Set a strong password policy across your enterprise applications, to ensure that your organization is not compromised through your employees’ use of weak passwords
Use two-factor authentication or multi-factor authentication to enhance the security of applications carrying sensitive data
Ensure that your DNS filter works effectively to block out malicious websites that your employees may try to access
Block access to employees’ personal emails at work, so that there a lesser chance of data compromise and data breaches through phishing
Set up IP-based or device-based restrictions so that unauthorized persons are kept out of your applications when they try to access them from unsafe locations or unrecognized devices

An identity and access management solution (IAM) like Akku can help you take control of all the preventive methods listed above, all in one go.

Get in touch with us through sales@akku.work if you wish to know more about how Akku can help protect your organization from identity theft through identity/access management.

Dedicated servers for unmatched transparency in data privacy

Apart from data security, data privacy represents a major area of concern in IT security today. When it comes to data privacy, all organizations are very particular about where and how their company data is being saved, and who has access to it.

This is also related to one of the major reasons why organizations still hesitate to move their data to the cloud – “who else has access to my data if I move to cloud?” Even though almost every IaaS and PaaS provider tries to build confidence in their clients through certifications by authorized agencies, many enterprises are still not convinced. The reason is that there are still areas that lack transparency, where details on their data privacy are not clearly explained and conveyed to them.

To make things more complicated, in many cases, “backdoors” are being legalized by governments!

An effective identity and access management (IAM) solution plays a major role in data privacy and security and could go a long way in addressing the concerns that many businesses have. However, when it comes to IAM, most of the tools do not provide a dedicated server for each of their clients. While it is a fact that a dedicated server tends to cost more when it comes to pricing to the service provider, it is definitely the best way to provide 100% visibility to the client on their company data.

When a dedicated server is assigned to a client, it is possible to share server access between the client and service provider – the service provider cannot login without the client’s knowledge, and the client cannot login without the service provider’s knowledge. This may present some practical difficulties, but it is the only way to give a client 100% confidence that their data is truly under their control.

While it is true that all models have their own advantages and disadvantages, the use of a dedicated server for each client is clearly the best solution in terms of visibility and transparency, with minimal practical difficulty.

Secure and Efficient Certificate-Based Authentication

Security and privacy of user data are crucial for any organization and is also a major area of risk. So a Secure and Efficient Authentication (SEA) is very important.

How do you make authentication secure and efficient? Let me share some insights on how this can be achieved through certificate-based authentication…

In general, a certificate is a means of creating evidence. In the domain of identity and access management, a certificate creates evidence in the form of a digital signature to verify the identity of an individual, a company, or other entity, and associates that identity with a public key.

Like a driver’s license or passport, a certificate provides a generally recognized proof of a person’s identity. Certificates have one main purpose: to establish trust.

Authentication is the process that verifies that a user is who they say they are. So a certificate makes authentication more efficient because the identity cannot be changed.

By enabling the certificate-based authentication, it is possible to reliably evaluate the user’s right to access the requested resource.

How does it work?

First, the user enters their private password.
The client receives the private key, and creates an evidence – in this case, in the form of a certificate or digital signature.
Now, the client sends the evidence through a secured connection across the network.
The server uses the evidence to authenticate the user identity.
Finally, the server authorizes the evidence and allows access.

This brings us to the question of how to implement a certificate-based authentication in your organization.

Akku by CloudNow is a powerful and secure identity and access management solution that uses certificate-based authentication to control user identity and secure access to your environment. Learn more at www.akku.work

Cloud Security Solutions – Why do you need them?

Migration to the cloud is no longer an emerging trend. It is now a well-established method of running the operations of a business. With the cloud, you can manage data and applications in a secure environment and ensure that your users face virtually no latency while using your applications. But although the cloud comes with a basic framework for security, it still has its inherent security risks which need highly specific cloud security solutions to reliably protect your data.

To understand the need for implementing an effective cloud security solution, a deeper understanding of what causes and constitutes a cloud security threat is important.

Why Do You Need Cloud Security Solutions?

Unsecured Access Points

With several of your applications operating from the cloud, it is crucial to manage their access. Traditional methods of granting access to applications on the cloud require users to remember several sets of credentials. But with such a method, forgotten passwords would be common, draining the productivity of both your IT team and your users. To overcome this, users tend to set weak passwords which are easy to remember. But weak passwords are also easy to hack! The solution to this problem is to use an Identity and Access Management solution like CloudNow Technologies’ Akku.

Unprotected APIs

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are software interfaces which allow two different components of software to talk to each other. APIs are responsible for getting the requests from client systems and passing it onto the server and then retrieving the response and sending it back to the client. Considering that such an integral component is a part of your network architecture, a web application security solution is kept in place to eliminate the threat of unchecked network access from unauthorized users.

Types of Cloud Security Issues

DoS attack

DoS or Denial of Service is a distributed and malicious attack, designed to corrupt your servers and deny access to legitimate users. Such attacks require a complete hack of your network and injections of the attack code. A DoS attack is another common threat faced by organizations operating on the cloud. To eliminate this type of attack, it is important to maintain an intelligent firewall which can effectively stop the attack.

Data Breach

Cyber wars now directly translate to breaches and corruption of data. Since most organizations have to rely on third-party cloud vendors for storage, they increasingly feel like they are not in control of what happens to their data and applications. Data breach is one of the most common types of security threats, whether it happens on the cloud or any other type of storage. For this reason, companies have to go a step further and deploy high-end security solutions to prevent data breaches. While the move to the cloud can improve the efficiency of your operations to a great extent, it also requires you to choose a vendor you can trust to protect your network against the threats mentioned above. CloudNow’s cloud security solutions provide you with the security edge you require to peacefully conduct operations on the cloud without worrying about the threats trying to breach your network.

Akku – Secure your Enterprise Communication

Akku is a great way to control and authenticate communication channels for any enterprise.

One of the biggest threats to any organization is the possibility of a data breach, which can result in loss of data, loss of trust, and ultimately, loss of growth of the business. This makes data security a critical aspect to consider in any enterprise.

An important consideration, especially for SME businesses, is to secure their data – most companies still look for a way to do it in the traditional approach to data security – with an on-premise local environment.

Running the organization with an on-premise environment requires a dedicated workforce, this can be replaced with a secure cloud-based environment. But how does this fit in with Akku? Akku is a pure cloud Identity and Access Management solution that can be integrated with cloud, hybrid or on-prem applications.

So how can Akku help your organization?

Akku’s first great feature would be its Single Sign-on (SSO), where any enterprise’s user accounts and applications can be integrated into a single platform – making access easy for users and control easy for admins.

Unauthorized access is restricted by Akku, which is built on a certificate-based authentication architecture.

It is also possible to filter the content accessed by an organization’s users – DNS filtering to control websites that can be accessed, YouTube filtering to ensure only relevant video content is viewed, and even personal email blocking to improve productivity and security.

Akku also maintains highly granular logs, allowing for detailed reporting on user behavior – time, location, OS and so on for users logging in.

These are just a few of the functionalities that Akku brings to the table to add value to your organization’s data security.

So fight back against data breaches, and tell the world “My Data and Communication are secure!”

Is Your Data Secure? No…

As per a survey by Forrester Research (Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper, February 2017), in the last 4 years, out of every three organizations, two have had an average of at least 5 breaches. There are nearly 6 billion data records that were stolen and lost in the past 10 years. According to www.breachlevelindex.com, an average of 165,000 records are compromised every hour. According to this article published on www.csoonline.com, global cybercrime related damage is expected to exceed US$ 6 trillion annually by the year 2021.

How can IAM help protect data?

Identification: Users make their claim on their identity by entering a username and verify through an authentication process
Authentication: Authentication may be a password or may rely on advanced technologies, such as biometric and token-based authentication
Authorization: The IAM system must then verify the user’s authorization to perform the requested activity and also ensure that users perform actions only within their scope of authority

Together, these three processes combine to ensure that specified users have the access they need to do their jobs, while unauthorized users are kept away from sensitive resources and information. Effective IAM solutions help enterprises facilitate secure, efficient access to technology resources across these diverse systems.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the information security discipline that allows users access to appropriate technology resources, at the right time. It incorporates three major concepts:

According to this article on BizTech magazine, improved data security is one of the three main reasons to deploy an IAM solution.

The article highlights the fact that consolidating authentication and authorization functionality on a single platform provides IT professionals with a consistent method for managing user access. And when a user leaves an organization, IT administrators may revoke their access in the centralized IAM solution with the confidence that this revocation will immediately take effect across all of the technology platforms integrated with that IAM platform.

So implement an identity and access management solution at your organization to take a major step towards improved data security.