Securing Your Digital Identity
Many people have experienced the gut-churning feeling when they check their credit card statement and see unfamiliar transactions or log on to a social media account and see posts they didn’t make. That mobile phone SIM bought in a country they’ve never been to, and the Facebook post with a link to a phishing site shows that their online accounts are compromised, and identity theft has occurred. In extreme cases all of a person's online accounts can be compromised, taken over, used for malicious purposes or theft, and even in some cases deleted which can destroy a trusted online identity that took years to build.
Digital Identity Protection is Vital
Protecting your identity has always been important. For example, by making sure your physical driving license, passport, identity or student card were safe. In the digital age we all inhabit it is equally important to protect the digital tokens that confirm our identity for online services. Whether that means account login credentials, credit card information or Government provided identities for online services.
Protecting digital identities doesn’t stop with people. The rapid growth of connected devices and the IoT (Internet of Things) has seen the number of devices that need to authenticate to networks with a digital identity grow exponentially. With exponential growth comes exponential risk.
It is vital that all entry points into business systems are protected from malicious actors looking to compromise digital identities, irrespective of whether the identities are used by people or by network devices and services. A widely cited recent survey by Verizon reported that 80% of data breaches are the result of lost, stolen, or weak identity credentials.
Protecting Digital Identities
It’s clear that there is a need to make sure that all digital identities are protected. Techniques such as the following are often used for this:
- Complex password enforcement
- Unique password enforcement to prevent password use for multiple systems
- Biometric authentication (fingerprints, Face Recognition)
- Two-factor authentication
- Single-use authentication
- And many more…
These techniques do help secure digital identities, but they can be onerous for users and if implemented badly they can actually reduce security. Who hasn’t seen passwords on sticky notes, or account sharing within teams?
Many security solution providers have identified protecting digital identity as a vital part of the overall network and application security piece. They have built identity management and monitoring into their security offerings to enable Enterprise business to manage identities while reducing the inconvenience for users who need to access business systems.
We are here to guide you to the best solution
Many of our trusted security partners have tools that will allow you to manage digital identities safely. Entrust Datacard, CA Technologies, and SecureEnvoy all have products that can be customised to suit an organisation's particular needs.
We can work with you and out trusted security vendors to help you select the best solutions for your specific needs. Contact us to start the ball rolling so that you can secure the digital identity of every person and device that uses your applications and services.
Simon