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This massive and sudden shift in the first half of 2020 towards remote working has led to the adoption of cloud technology. The security implications of this transition will be seen in the years to come and we must be prepared to take appropriate action.
The Duo Report on Remote Access
Cisco Duo Security, with its modern login security, is designed to protect all users, devices and applications. It offers secure access and a scalable, easy-to-implement SaaS solution that natively protects all applications. It also allows intuitive authentication for users. In Duo’s report on remote access, you might get some interesting facts about this evolution towards remote working. Thus, we know that 78% of the workers surveyed worked at least 60% of the time from home in March of this year.
Another noteworthy fact was the 72% increase in authentication with multifactor remote technology and an 85% increase in the use of policies to disallow authentication via SMS. As for iOS devices, they were four times more likely to receive and install updates than Android devices. Additionally, the use of biometrics-enabled devices increased by 64%. Daily authentications in cloud applications also increased by 40% during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic. The goal of these companies at the time was to keep working and ensure safe access to their services.
Obsolete devices and biometrics
By the time the coronavirus pandemic began, the priority of many companies was to stay operational. The goal was to work as hard as possible to reduce losses as much as possible. Now, with the evolution towards remote working, we try to reduce the risk by implementing a more mature and modern approach to security.
This sudden change at the beginning of the year involved the use of many personal devices. This resulted in blocked login attempts due to the use of outdated devices and this event increased by 90% in March. The positive is that, the following month, it was significantly reduced, which indicates that these devices have been replaced by more reliable and safe ones.
Another finding is that SIM-swapping attacks have led companies to tighten up their authentication schemes. So if we take last year as a starting point, the percentage of organizations enforcing a policy to not allow SMS authentication went from 8.7% to 16.1%. An interesting fact is that biometrics is becoming more and more common in the corporate environment, to think about a future without a password. Therefore, 80% of mobile devices used to work today have biometrics configured, which is 12% more than in the last five years.
Industry multi-factor authentication methods
We will now see how multi-factor authentication methods are evolving in two sectors of the industry through some graphs. This is what the financial sector is doing.
This is the graph of the tech sector.
As you can see, the use of SMS authentication in both industries is very low, as more modern and secure methods are applied. For this reason, we previously mentioned that its usage had significantly decreased. A troubling fact is that over 30% of Windows devices in healthcare organizations were still using Windows 7 even though support ended.
As for the evolution to remote work, it is causing a number of changes. The use of applications in the cloud is about to overtake the use of on-premises applications. Thus, applications in the cloud account for 13.2% of all Duo authentications, up 5.4% from last year. As for local applications, they represent 18.5% of the total, and have undergone a decrease of 1.5% compared to last year. In this sense, it would not be surprising if cloud applications soon overtake local applications.
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