By
Eva Hanscom
April 30, 2019
Thursday is World Password Day. This event serves reminds consumers to “layer up” their logins by enabling multifactor authentication on their devices and online accounts.
World Password Day is a collaborative effort supported by dozens of companies, non-profits and cybersecurity organizations to raise awareness about the importance of improving password security. Through the efforts of World Password Day, millions of internet users across 251 countries have pledged to use better password habits – a good step toward addressing the threat of cybercrime.
However, is this important day missing a crucial element of identity protection? After all, businesses still need to address another growing identity and access management (IAM) concern: protecting their machine identities.
There are two actors on every network: people and machines. People rely on usernames and passwords to identify themselves to machines so they can gain access to data and services. Machines authenticate themselves and communicate with one another through the use of digital keys and certificates, which serve as machine identities.
Every year businesses spend billions of dollars protecting user identities. Indeed, the industry invests in many password security awareness events like World Password Day, but it spends very little on machine identity protection. Cybercriminals see this vulnerability and target the much more powerful and valuable machine identities for the access they grant across corporate networks.
“I think we need to expand events like World Password Day to include machine identities so that we can educate and encourage businesses to improve their machine identity protection practices and avoid unnecessary security risks,” says Kevin Bocek, vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi. “As the number of machines in businesses continues to grow, protecting machine identities become even more critical.”
A good first step for many organizations is to learn how they use machine identities on networks. For more, be sure to check out is Scott Carter’s blog: 5 Ways Machine Identities Are Being Used In Your Organization [Why You Should Protect Them].
In the blog, Carter outlines five ways in which organizations use machine identities to protect sensitive machine-to-machine communication:
Bocek concludes: “Cyber criminals are becoming bored primarily targeting people, so they are now exploiting the power of machine identities. Unfortunately, because many organizations don’t understand the risk, they haven’t invested in the intelligence or automation necessary to protect their machine identities.”
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