When you’ve put your whole heart into building up your business, the last thing you want is for a scammer to take it down. Especially with new advancements in technology, there are more opportunities than ever for criminals to infiltrate your business, gain access to sensitive data, and commit fraud. The consequences of this can be damaging – both financially and emotionally. The good news is that there are plenty of ways to battle fraud risks, including using multifactor authentication (MFA). With MFA in place, you can add another line of defense to keep your business as safe as possible.

What Threats do Businesses Face?

With remote work becoming more common, many businesses are regularly digitizing files and other information as well as communicating through email. While these are useful habits for many companies, they can also lead to opportunities for fraud. Most commonly, organizations are falling under the threat of business email compromise (BEC) scams. In a BEC, a scammer will send an email that looks like it comes from a trusted source and convince victims to supply information, gift cards, or money which the criminal or criminal organization can then use for fraudulent purposes. Other times, these emails can contain malware that will infiltrate the company’s network and allow scammers to access sensitive information such as billings, invoices, or even customer lists to form more attacks.

BEC scams can also be difficult to spot if you aren’t familiar with them. Some might spoof real email addresses using slight misspellings, some may rely on phishing and social engineering to trick employees into thinking the message is urgent, and others might originate from hijacked accounts. Either way, enabling multifactor authentication for employee emails and other apps is a step in the right direction for preventing BEC scams.

What is Multifactor Authentication?

 Multifactor authentication, also known as MFA, is an added level of security that can keep criminals from breaching barriers and hijacking devices or apps such as email. With MFA, users will be asked for two or more methods of identity verification to access a document, account, or device. These verification methods can include:

  • Something Users Know
    This refers to usernames, passwords, or PIN numbers.
  • Something Users Have
    This includes a phone number for a confirmation call or text, or a secondary authentication app.
  • Something Users Are
    This can mean a fingerprint or face scan.

Having MFA is a lot safer than just using a password on its own since passwords can easily be duplicated or stolen. By using MFA for your business’s email accounts, financial services, social media, and more, you can ensure that your company’s confidential information is in the right hands.

Benefits of Using MFA

  • Extra Security for You
    It can be a pain for people to juggle multiple unique passwords for multiple accounts – not to mention the risks that come with this. They may write their passwords down, tape them to their monitor, share passwords among different systems, or reuse the same password, allowing scammers to access several of the user’s accounts and breach sensitive data. Having MFA implemented adds a second component to the login using something you have, such as a cell phone, token, etc., to ensure that you are who you say you are – even if your main password has been stolen or otherwise compromised. Plus, the account user will still be prompted to confirm any secondary authentication even if a scammer has accessed his or her password, making it much easier to stop fraud before it happens.

  • Extra Security for Your Business
    If you are a business owner or an employee with a company card, enabling MFA can be a useful way to protect your business’s bank account. MFA can be triggered whenever someone logs into the account through online banking and whenever external payments are made through ACH, wires, or person to person. Not to mention, some financial institutions may consider fraud a business owner’s responsibility if they have not taken the proper precautions against it. Therefore, having the additional security of MFA is not only great for keeping hackers out of your organization’s finances, but also for making sure you’ll be covered in case an incident does occur.

  • Ensures That Your Business is Compliant
    MFA can keep your business safe by both protecting data and by satisfying regulations in your industry, cyber insurance requirements, or even legal contractual requirements. Having multifactor authentication on your company’s devices and accounts can help ensure that your data permissions and classifications meet the standards set by data privacy regulators such as HIPPA, GDPR, and more.

  • Added Protection for Remote Work
    For companies with remote employees, MFA can add extra protection to prevent hackers from impersonating remote workers or accessing confidential information stored on remote devices. For example, adaptive authentication is one form of MFA that can assess where a user is logging in from, if they are trying to access information after–hours, if they are using a safe or familiar device, and if they are connecting from a private or public network. If adaptive authentication recognizes any red flags, a code will be sent to the user’s phone to verify their identity, making it easier to separate real employees from potential scammers. 

Summary

Protecting your business’s data is important not just for you, but for your team and your customers too. If a scammer gets a hold of your organization’s sensitive information, it can be used to commit fraud and lead to financially devastating consequences for those involved. Luckily, multifactor authentication is one tool that you can use to boost your company’s digital security. When MFA is used alongside scam recognition training and strong online safety habits, you can rest assured knowing that your organization is better prepared to stop scammers before it’s too late.