The critical requirement for security & protection

Passwords have long been the primary method of authentication, but as is widely understood, they suffer from several inherent weaknesses. Users choose weak passwords or reuse them across multiple accounts, leaving them vulnerable to brute-force attacks or credential stuffing. Additionally, passwords can be stolen through phishing attacks (that is the sending of specially crafted messages that entice the receiver to provide sensitive information) or intercepted through data breaches, something that happens with monotonous regularity. Ultimately, maintaining complex passwords is a burden for users, leading to frustration and decreased security as they resort to insecure practices.

Passwordless authentication eliminates the need for traditional passwords by leveraging alternative methods to verify user identities. These methods include biometric factors like fingerprint or facial recognition, hardware tokens, and email or SMS-based codes. By employing these techniques, passwordless authentication provides a stronger security foundation while simplifying the authentication process for users. It not only reduces the risk of password-related attacks but also offers a more user-friendly and convenient experience.

With ever increasing use of cloud applications and data, and with more people working remotely, the need for enhanced digital security grows, but this is at odds with the vulnerabilities of 20th-century password authentication.

By eliminating the vulnerabilities of passwords and providing a more convenient user experience, passwordless authentication is a much more effective and reliable method to support user authentication.

Microsoft offers several passwordless solutions supporting authentication into Windows, Microsoft 365 and Azure, including:

• Windows Hello for Business, a biometric authentication function using fingerprint or facial recognition to sign into devices and apps.
• Microsoft Authenticator, which delivers push notifications to allow users to sign into devices and apps.
• Fast Identity Online 2 (FIDO2) security keys, which are physical keys that can be used to sign into devices and apps. These are available from providers such as RSA, Yubico, Fortinet, TrustKey and others.

Passwordless authentication is becoming more attractive every day, and we are already implementing solutions for our customers. Contact us to see how we can help you improve your user authentication security with your passwordless requirements.

For any business or organisation, ensuring the integrity of user identification and logins is a major consideration. Using login names and passwords alone to verify a user is not safe, given all the known issues with passwords.

One of the simplest ways to improve user login security is to add multi-factor authentication (MFA), sometimes known as two-factor authentication or 2FA.

MFA requires users to provide at least two forms of identification to gain access to a system or application. These typically fall into three categories: something you know (such as a password or PIN), something you have (like a smartphone or hardware token), or something you are (biometric attributes such as fingerprints or facial recognition). By combining these different factors, MFA adds an extra layer of security, significantly reducing the risk of unauthorised access and account compromise. Although a hacker may have got hold of a login name and password, it is extremely unlikely they would have the phone or user’s biometrics in order to complete the authentication process (and if they did, you would most likely realise and could block the device).

Microsoft offers a number of multi-factor authentication solutions to support varying scenarios and requirements:

• Microsoft Authenticator, which is installed on your mobile device and generates a one-time password (OTP) or push notifications that need to be approved or rejected.
• Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), a solution that enables organisations to add a wide range of verification methods to protect their apps and data, including mobile app notifications, phone calls, SMS messages, and hardware tokens. Azure MFA integrates with many Microsoft and non-Microsoft services to secure cloud-based and on-premises systems and applications.
• Windows Hello for Business, a biometric authentication function using fingerprint or facial recognition to sign into devices and apps.
• Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Conditional Access, which provides policy-based access controls that can enforce multi-factor authentication based on specific conditions. Using Conditional Access (CA) you can define policies that require additional authentication factors when accessing certain applications or resources, depending on considerations such as location, device type, or user group. CA, therefore, provides a very controllable and precise level of targeting for managing authentication requirements.

Multi-factor authentication is a robust security measure that significantly strengthens your protection against unauthorised access and account compromise. Contact us to find out how we can help you add MFA to protect your organisation.

Historically, desktop and laptop computers have been critical malware entry points because of the specific threats from users opening malicious emails, browsing suspect websites, downloading infected files or attaching unsafe USB devices.

It is therefore very important that these devices are protected by anti-malware or endpoint security software as part of a wider protection strategy.

These days, an endpoint security solution needs to do much more than looking for known viruses, they also need to protect against operating system vulnerabilities, prevent access to phishing sites, identify indicators of compromise, stop malevolent use of legitimate applications like PowerShell, block unusual or unauthorised activity and use machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide all-around protection. Furthermore, where the endpoint solution is part of a suite of products, they should work together to share information so that threats detected by one component can be reported to and acted on by other components.

Microsoft has been a leader in organisational security for many years and has created a suite of security-focused products under the Defender branding, covering desktop, laptop, server, mobile and cloud environments.

For desktops, laptops and mobile devices, Defender for Endpoint provides an all-encompassing, cloud-hosted capability to protect your devices from ransomware, malware, vulnerabilities and numerous other attacks, taking appropriate actions to mitigate risks, reduce exposure and prevent infections.

Using modern anti-malware techniques such as machine learning, behavioural detection, artificial intelligence, shared knowledge from other Defender products, and other active detection technology, Defender for Endpoint provides comprehensive protection for your organisation. Indeed, since it covers such a wide range of threats, Microsoft brands it as an eXtended Detection & Response – XDR solution.

We have helped many of our customers to benefit from the implementation of Defender for Endpoint, with some even finding historic malware that has avoided detection by the previous endpoint protection solution. Additionally, it is often the case that these organisations and businesses have benefitted from cost savings and administration improvements through the consolidation of multiple third-party solutions into the Microsoft Defender platform.

Contact us to find out more about Defender for Endpoint and how we can help your organisation improve its level of protection against malware, ransomware and other threats.