Amid the pandemic, MFA's shortcomings are clearer than ever
Due to you-know-what (if I have to type "corona" or "COVID" again, I'll scream), enterprises have been forced to send a massive number of employees into makeshift home offices within just a few days. That means that there was no time for the security niceties, such as properly processing RFPs for apps that were thoroughly vetted. Given the emergency, employees and IT teams worked with what they could, figuring that they would improve security on the fly as soon as circumstances permitted.
That brings us to MFA. Multifactor authentication is supposed to be just that, but it's typically deployed in the least secure manner — sending straight numeric texts to a mobile device, a tactic that is well-known to be susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. So, are there better ways to deploy MFA, something that can be easily executed under today's far-less-than-ideal conditions? Let's dig in.