Friday 30th November marks this year’s International Computer Security Day, an initiative designed to promote best practice in cybersecurity, but as reports of hacking attacks grow exponentially, what can businesses and regulators be doing to protect people from having their data stolen and their digital identities compromised?
Yogesh Patel, Chief Data Scientist at Callsign, the authentication platform which uses deep learning technology to power adaptive access control for enterprises, argues that we should all take a leaf out of California’s book and make simple and easy to hack passwords a thing of the past.
Yogesh Patel, Chief Data Scientist at Callsign:
“The decision by the State of California to ban simple passwords that are easy to guess was a great first step in tackling the issue of online fraud. However, a secure password alone will not have a dramatic impact on the reduction of the problem. In order to stop fraudsters in their tracks we must go beyond passwords and biometric security to the next stage, Intelligence Driven Authentication (IDA), which will be the panacea for protecting identities and defending against data breaches.
“While we have come on leaps and bounds in terms of biometric authentication technology which has helped improve the protection of our identities online, the ability to collect sufficient biometric data tends to be quite difficult and consequently, it is also not 100% secure. By incorporating both hard (facial recognition, fingerprints, iris scanning) and soft (behavioural characteristics e.g. how people type, move their mouse or hold their smart phone) biometrics, which are personal and unique to each individual, and combine them with advance machine learning, businesses can guarantee the security of their customers’ data.”
