Data breaches continue to be a business-threatening menace for enterprise leaders, IT professionals and even employees. Cybersecurity Ventures’ 2022 Official Cybercrime Report predicts the cost of cybercrime will reach $8 trillion in 2023 and surge to $10.5 trillion by 2025.
Recently, some big players—Meta, Twitter and even the U.S. House of Representatives—have been hit by data breaches at the end of 2022 and into 2023. Clearly, this isn’t a problem that is going away. In fact, security experts predict data breaches will continue to surge well into the foreseeable future.
The annual Identity Management Day on April 11, 2023, shines a spotlight on rising cybercrime and educates business leaders, IT decision makers and consumers on the critical need to secure online identities. Compromised credentials, historically the root cause of most data breaches, accounted for 63% of cyberattacks in 2022. This important event, put on in partnership with the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA) and the National Cybersecurity Alliance, focuses on raising security awareness, developing best practices and implementing readily available identity management technologies to thwart cybercrimes.
According to IDSA, 70% of organizations experienced an identity-related security breach in the last two years. That coincides with the evolution of the modern business world where digital assets are often decentralized and broadly distributed. Plus, digital technology has advanced with cloud computing, microservices, API gateways, and SaaS applications—adding even more complexity to an already complicated process of securing identities.
The most common way for bad actors to gain access to complex, distributed environments is through passwords. When exposed passwords and identity credentials appear in password dumps, cybercriminals know that users are likely to have similar, if not identical, passwords across their accounts—whether business or personal.
Even if a password is different from the one exposed, bad actors and the artificial intelligence (AI) technology they deploy can simply try variations until they gain access. By ensuring that the right users have access to the right resources under approved conditions, users attempting to access the network by force become more visible and countermeasures can be put in place.
In increasingly complex and distributed IT environments, the traditional way access control falls short. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) simply aren’t scalable, adaptable and flexible enough to meet the needs of a modern enterprise.
Policy-Based Access Control (PBAC) is a more advanced and flexible authorization strategy for complex and distributed IT environments. It provides centralized authorization management and allows application owners to create clear, adaptable policies based on the specific needs of the organization. PBAC enables cybersecurity as a key business enabler that makes enterprise access control seamless and secure. It works across the modern technology stack consisting of data lakes and warehouses, APIs, microservices, cloud infrastructure, third-party and homegrown applications.
Identity Management Day 2023 is a day dedicated to building awareness about the need to secure identities. It comes at a time of surging data breaches and other cybercrimes that can derail business and impact the bottom line. But identity management should be top-of-mind with business leaders and IT decision makers every day.
It’s also important to remember that prevention is much more effective than cure. By training staff to spot phishing attempts by bad actors, credentials are unlikely to be exposed in the first place. If we can do that, and in combination with succinct access controls, then organizations will be much more likely to prevent many of these breaches before they even occur.
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