CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 10, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM
(NYSE: IBM) Security today announced it is extending its
artificial intelligence (AI) technology originally developed to
protect users in the financial services industry, to clients in all
industries via the company's identity-as-a-service
(IDaaS) offering. IBM Cloud
Identity now features AI-based adaptive access
capabilities that help continually assess employee or consumer user
risk levels when accessing applications and services. The solution
escalates suspicious user interactions for further authentication,
while those identified as lower risk are "fast tracked" so they can
access applications and services they need.
With data breaches on the rise, traditional means of
securing access, like passwords, are often not enough to prevent
unauthorized access. The rise of credential-stuffing attacks,
where a malicious actor obtains a list of credentials and
tests them at various other sites using a bot, demonstrates that
many password combinations have been leaked. According to a 2019
report, compromised and weak credentials are cited as the
cause for more than 80% of data
breaches.1 Meanwhile, 2017 research found that
large companies are managing hundreds of applications – up to 788
custom applications on average for companies with more than 50,000
employees.2 Considering the amount of programs and
passwords that employees are managing between their professional
and personal lives, it is increasingly important that new security
measures do not hinder user experience.
"Companies are constantly trying to optimize both security and
user experience, but the trick is ensuring security is not
disrupting the everyday user journey," said Jason
Keenaghan, Director, IBM Security. "IBM Cloud Identity with
adaptive access is using AI to give organizations a holistic view
of context for user access, based on indicators like malware and
risk indicators, device insights, and user behavior, to help them
focus security on high risk logins and give the majority of users
seamless access to their accounts and applications."
Adaptive Access: Smart Context
Many organizations continue to rely on older username and
password methods to provide employee and consumer users access to
services. Due to the patchwork of applications and solutions
organizations are working with, they may not be able to deploy more
modern security layers. This can create a blind spot that prevents
security teams from easily implementing rules that flag suspicious
indicators like malicious logins, unknown locations, unrecognized
devices, and whether a user is on a company's network VPN.
IBM Cloud Identity is an identity-as-a-service solution that
helps organizations connect every user to every application using
adaptive access. Through the use of AI, the service helps simplify
access management and security for users by assigning user risk
levels based on a defined set of factors. With these risk levels,
administrators can create rules that level up or level down
authentication - implementing strong authentication but only when
needed. The service leverages the following features to determine
risk and enable adaptive access decisions:
- Artificial Intelligence - a user behavior score is
assigned based on the level of trust or risk assessed for each
user. A number of factors are assessed including web intelligence,
location data, malware and risk indicators, and device insights.
For example, using AI, the system can detect irregular mouse
movements or flag a user trying to login from a browser infected
with keylogging malware. IBM Cloud Identity with adaptive access
leverages IBM Trusteer AI technology to assess users based on a
fraud evidence database, fraudulent pattern analysis, and
cross-organizational patterning.
- Smart Access and Seamless Login: Since AI capabilities
are able to assign risk levels, only users considered to pose a
higher threat are prompted to go through multifactor authentication
or denied access. By only prompting specific users to further
verify their identification, rather than all users, organizations
may be able to reduce operational expenses related to items such as
two-factor authentication and help desk password resets for both
current and new users. This can potentially lead to cost cuts
considering organizations spanning different sectors have allocated
more than $1 million per year to
password-related support alone.3
- Low-code Deployment: Adaptive access policies can be
created and applied to applications and APIs with little to no
development effort, and without application changes.
"According to our primary research results, the establishment of
low-friction end user experiences has the potential to help boost
security effectiveness while reducing management efforts and
related costs," said Steve Brasen, Research Director, Enterprise
Management Associates. "By injecting intelligence into access
processes, IBM is helping its customers implement the appropriate
level of authentication enforcement for users while minimizing
impacts to their productivity."
To learn more about IBM Cloud Identity with adaptive access,
visit: www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/cloud-identity
About IBM Security
IBM Security offers one of the most
advanced and integrated portfolios of enterprise security products
and services. The portfolio, supported by world-renowned IBM
X-Force® research, enables organizations to effectively manage risk
and defend against emerging threats. IBM operates one of the
world's broadest security research, development and delivery
organizations, monitors 70 billion security events per day in
more than 130 countries, and has been granted more than 10,000
security patents worldwide. For more information, please
check www.ibm.com/security, follow @IBMSecurity on Twitter or
visit the IBM Security Intelligence blog.
CONTACT:
Kimberly Samra
ksamra@ibm.com
510-468-6406
1 2019 Data Breach Investigations
Report (Verizon, 2019)
2 Custom Applications and IaaS Trends 2017 (Cloud
Security Alliance, 2017)
3 Best Practices: Selecting, Deploying, And Managing
Enterprise Password Managers (Forrester, 2018)
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SOURCE IBM