{"id":7910,"date":"2014-05-05T07:10:02","date_gmt":"2014-05-05T12:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mrc-productivity.com\/blog\/?p=7910"},"modified":"2022-11-22T11:19:31","modified_gmt":"2022-11-22T17:19:31","slug":"why-modern-business-applications-need-2-factor-authentication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mrc-productivity.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/why-modern-business-applications-need-2-factor-authentication\/","title":{"rendered":"Why modern business applications need 2-factor authentication"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Education\"Summary: As these security breaches increase at alarming rates, businesses must improve their application security practices. Learn how 2-factor authentication can protect your applications against one of the most common security risks, and keep your company from a disaster. <\/em><\/span>
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\n2013 was a record-setting year. Just…not in a good way. <\/p>\n

Did you realize that 2013 broke the previous all-time record<\/span> for the number of exposed records caused by reported data breach incidents? The 2,164 incidents reported during 2013 exposed over 822 million records, nearly doubling the previous high mark set in 2011. <\/p>\n

According to a recently released 2014 Data Breach Investigations Report<\/span><\/a>, this year isn\u2019t off to a great start either. Besides the widely publicized \u201cHeartbleed\u201d bug, we\u2019re seeing a growing number of data breaches.<\/p>\n

The leading cause of data breaches: Stolen credentials. Hackers steal login credentials and use them to access an application or system. For businesses, the results can be devastating. Hackers can steal confidential company information, customer credit card numbers, employee data, and more. To make matters worse, the negative press generated by such an attack can often surpass the damage done by the hackers themselves.<\/p>\n

How to protect your applications<\/h3>\n

So, how can you protect your business web applications from this threat? While I could rattle off a long list of security best practices, here\u2019s a great place to start: Implement 2-factor authentication in your sensitive web applications. <\/p>\n

What is 2-factor authentication? Two-factor authentication adds a second level of security to an account log-in. As illustrated below, rather than identifying users with a single factor (user name\/password), it adds a second identification factor to the login process–usually a pin number delivered via sms to the user’s mobile device. Used in popular web services (like Gmail, Twitter, Linkedin, etc…), two factor authentication is designed to maintain security, even if a user\u2019s login credentials are compromised.<\/p>\n

\"Two
Two factor authentication requires two forms of identification before granting access to an account.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How 2-factor authentication helps businesses<\/h3>\n

While businesses may not need 2-factor authentication on every single application, it’s a great way to protect sensitive business data or employee information. For example, here a couple of ways 2-factor authentication can help secure your data:<\/p>\n