Flee passwords — please — and create biometric layers to protect businesses

It is hard to argue with an FBI special agent quoted in a trade article about the continued success of social engineering and phishing.

“I’m shocked that 50 years (after the Internet’s birth), we’re still dealing with passwords as a component for authentication,” Enrique Alvarez told PYMNTS.com. It would be news if fraudsters did not say the same thing every night before sleeping.

Alvarez, who works in the FBI’s cyber unit in San Francisco, was discussing the need to bring multifactor authentication that includes biometrics to bare in the campaign to shut down retail and workplace fraud.

Workplace fraud in this case means criminals impersonating or otherwise social engineering themselves into a position to steal data and money from businesses.

If a U.S. business owner is starting to take the matter seriously, they likely are putting in place methods to spot patterns to crime. And even if they are using AI to do that, their results will be a record of illicit access after the fact.

In an opinion piece for Forbes.com, Mitek chief technologist Stephen Ritter recommends that AI be applied in layers to see problems closer to real time.

One example, biometric liveness detection, of which Mitek considers itself an innovator, can be deployed to spot voice and video fakes used to get access, valuables or information. It is strong protection, Ritter says, and it is stronger when adding other biometric information or even multi-factor authentication.

Article Topics

access management  |  biometrics  |  cybersecurity  |  FBI  |  fraud prevention  |  identity verification  |  multifactor authentication