What role does FinTech play in improving cybersecurity breaches?

By Puja Sharma

Around 80% of respondents said they are likely to evaluate solutions that eliminate the risks and costs of passwords and legacy multi-factor authentication. While 60% of surveyed professionals said their organizations had not adopted more secure, passwordless solutions, the majority are evaluating improvements to their security.

authID, a provider of secure identity authentication solutions, has released the results of its Second Annual Fintech Cybersecurity Survey, which assesses cyber professionals’ attitudes and perceptions on identity authentication solutions and uncovers insights about current and emerging trends in enterprise security.

With highly valued assets and loads of confidential data, FinTbiomech is frequently targeted by social engineering scams, phishing attacks, and account takeovers that prey on human vulnerabilities. These attacks can cause significant damage to companies’ reputation, positioning, market trust, and ultimately to their bottom line.

Despite these vulnerabilities, authID’s survey found that many organizations are still relying on legacy multi-factor authentication such as OTP (one-time-passwords) and KBA (knowledge-based authentication) which causes significant customer friction and leaves organizations vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Around 80% of respondents said they are likely to evaluate solutions that eliminate the risks and costs of passwords and legacy multi-factor authentication. While 60% of surveyed professionals said their organizations had not adopted more secure, passwordless solutions, the majority are evaluating improvements to their security. 80% indicated they are likely to evaluate solutions that eliminate the risks and costs of passwords and legacy MFA.

Building on results from last year’s report, the firm’s second annual survey allows cyber-professionals to track trends in multi-factor authentication methods, new technology readiness, and IT spending.

“As cybersecurity breaches continue to disrupt businesses, it is crucial to understand where the fintech market is positioned in terms of adopting improved security solutions,” said Jeremiah Mason, Chief Product Officer of authID. “This survey shows that while more organizations have adopted secure, passwordless authentication, the need and the market opportunity for replacing legacy MFA remains great.”

In 2022, ransomware continued to dominate the headlines. In the last year, ransomware breaches increased by 41%, and detecting and containing them took 49 days longer than the average breach. Ransomware gangs continued reemerging as new groups with the same key players after an arrest or major attack. Moreover, ransomware as a service is becoming more profitable and powerful for ransomware gangs.

The concept of zero trust evolved from being a new idea to a best practice. Hybrid work has led to the adoption of zero-trust frameworks – all users, apps, and devices requesting access are assumed to be unauthorized until proven otherwise. Organizations with a zero trust approach deployed saved nearly $1 million in average breach costs compared to organizations without zero trust deployed.

authID’s survey found that of the organizations which are considering legacy MFA alternatives, nearly one-third (31%) are assessing facial biometrics—such as authID’s Human Factor Authentication—which provides businesses and consumers with trusted, biometric account access and recovery with cloud biometrics bound to the user’s identity.

Additional key takeaways from the survey report include,

Key takeaways

• Nearly one-third (29%) of organizations have launched passwordless solutions, up from 22% last year.
• More than 80% of cybersecurity professionals at financial services and technology companies are worried about the daunting task of protecting both workforce and customer applications from cyber threats.
• Almost 2/3 of FinTech organizations still rely on vulnerable, often-phished passwords and legacy MFA for their customer and workforce applications—and 15% do not even use multi-factor authentication.
• 57% of respondents said they anticipate their level of investment in IT security will increase in 2023.