Customer Data Protection And The Death Of Passwords

Ridesharing, Airbnb, social media—there’s no doubt that the culture of sharing, whether that be our assets or innermost thoughts, has had a mostly positive impact on 21st century life.

But this sharing culture has also seeped into an area of our lives that it would do well to stay away from. Our passwords.

[REITs]

Q4 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc

Think about it. Doesn’t it seem strange that we protect our most personal data with a string of letters and numbers that are, at best, just our first pet and the year we were born and at worst “123456” (the most popular password in the world for pretty much every year since … well … the invention of passwords)? And with consumers becoming more aware of the rise in data breaches that expose their personally identifiable information (think passport numbers exposed by Marriott at the end of 2018), is it now time for us to either wise up or move on from passwords?

Here’s the truth—consumers are unlikely to wise up. Happily living in the bubble of, “It won’t happen to me,” we will continue to see “qwerty” or “Monty1989” (the author will neither confirm nor deny that this is the name of their first pet and the year they were born).

So now it’s time to move on. It’s time for companies to start looking to additional methods of authentication to protect their customer data. Let’s take a look at how companies can make that happen:

Multi-factor authentication: sing a phone number to send a text or make a phone call to confirm their identity
Risk-based authentication: looking for unusual patterns in users behaviour, such as location or browser.
Biometric authentication: using tools such as Touch ID or Face ID to confirm identity.

It’s important that companies roll out these features to show their commitment to customer data security. With the death of passwords just around the corner, let’s keep our customer data safe any way we can in the meantime. Have a look at the Infographic shared by LoginRadius a cloud-based customer identity and access management platform.