Microsoft, soft and hardware manufacturing giant, says it is worried that though cyber threats are rising by the day, businesses still lack strong identity protection against these threats.
The company in a recent threat and data research found out that just 22 percent of Cloud Identity Solution and Azure Active Directory users have implemented strong identity authentication protection.
The research shows further that the average price for 1,000 stolen username password pairs is around $0.97 while securing 400 million username and password combinations in bulk will earn a cyber criminal around $150.
“There can be little doubt, cyber criminals have our passwords in their sights. This is particularly the case in Africa where businesses are often more prone to cyber attacks than companies anywhere else in the world,” Mohamed El Nemr, Modern Workplace and Security Business Group Lead for Microsoft Middle East and Africa Emerging Markets, noted in a statement in Lagos.
El Nemr cited a recent report which says that Nigeria, ranked third in Africa, is experiencing 16.7 million cyber attacks while South Africa is ranked first with 32 million attacks, followed by Kenya at 28.3 million.
He noted that with weak passwords, password spraying, and phishing the entry point for most attacks, identity is the new battle ground of cyberthreats, advising that for organisations looking to protect themselves, preventing an identity from being misused or stolen, is now the highest priority.
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He disclosed that, as part of the first edition of Cyber Signals which is Microsoft’s new quarterly cyberthreat intelligence brief, the company is taking a closer look at the dangers of the rising mismatch in scale of identity-focused attacks in relation to levels of organisational preparedness.
“The brief, which offers an expert perspective into the current threat landscape, aims to be a valuable resource to Chief Information Security Officers in Nigeria, as they navigate the constantly changing threat landscape,” El Nemr explained.
“Cyber Signals aggregates insights we see from our research and security teams on the frontlines, including analysis from our 24 trillion security signals combined with intelligence we track by monitoring more than 40 nation-state groups and 140 threat groups,” he added
He noted that the newly released research shows that, though threats have been rising fast over the past two years, there has been low adoption of strong identity authentication, such as multifactor authentication and passwordless solutions.” In fact, just 22 percent of Microsoft’s Cloud Identity Solution, Azure Active Directory, users had implemented strong identity authentication protection as of December 2021,” he stressed.
However, the consequences of a data breach, he said, are now front of mind for 64 percent of companies in the Middle East and Africa (MEA), citing current Microsoft-IDC research.
“In fact risk experts across MEA rank cyber incidents as the second highest risk facing the region, largely because of the increase in both size and expense of data breaches,” he emphasised
El Nemr noted that this is helping to push organisations in Nigeria to pay closer attention to digital identities, pointing out that as it stands, confirming user identities with an additional layer of security is a key priority over the next six to 18 months for 60 percent of businesses in MEA.
He noted that another 75 percent of companies in MEA are actively investing in identity and access management as a response to their recognition of the danger that comes with remote work and increased digitization.
