MFA Archives - GenX Solutions

MFA Adoption: Benefits and Risks The global pandemic which forces many organizations to adopt the work from home model has led to the dramatic adoption of multi-factor authentication (MFA) as a cybersecurity measure. While MFA has its benefits, it also presents some risks. What Is MFA? MFA, short for multi-factor authentication, is another route to account security. Traditionally, accounts are protected by single-factor authentication composed mainly of the username and password combination. Single-factor authentication has shown to be easily compromised, for instance, through brute force attack – guessing the correct username and password combination through automated means. MFA promises to secure an account by requiring multiple forms of verification to prove one’s identity when signing into an application. There are many forms of MFA. One form is through the use…

Microsoft Details Causes & Prevention of Recent Office 365 Multi-Factor Failure Multi-factor authentication is meant to lock out cyber attackers. What happened instead last November 19 was that legitimate users of Microsoft Office 365 were locked out for hours from their accounts. For 14 hours, between 4:39 UTC and 18:38 UTC last November 19, users of Microsoft Azure AD Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) services were locked out from their accounts. These include users of Office 365, Azure, Dynamics and other services which use Azure Active Directory for authentication. The outage affected users in Europe, Asia and the Americas regions, including the U.S. Government and the U.K. Parliament. According to Microsoft, the following 4 reasons contributed to the Azure AD Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) service outage: The first cause of the outage identified…