Even as cyber threats become increasingly sophisticated, the number one attack vector for unauthorized access remains phished credentials (Verizon DBIR, 2024). Solving this problem resolves over 80% of your corporate risk, and a solution is possible.
However, most tools available on the market today cannot offer a complete defense against this attack vector because they were architected to deliver probabilistic defenses. Learn more about the characteristics of Beyond Identity that allow us to deliver deterministic defenses.
The Challenge: Phishing and Credential Theft
Phishing attacks trick users into revealing their credentials via deceptive sites or messages sent via SMS, email, and/or voice calls. Traditional defenses, such as end-user training or basic multi-factor authentication (MFA), lower the risk at best but cannot eliminate it. Users may still fall prey to scams, and stolen credentials can be exploited. Legacy MFA is a particularly urgent problem, given that attackers now bypass MFA at scale prompting NIST, CISA, OMB, and NYDFS to issue guidances for phishing-resistant MFA.
Beyond Identity’s Approach: Deterministic Security
Eliminate Phishing
Shared secrets, like passwords and OTPs, are inherently vulnerable because they can be intercepted or stolen. Beyond Identity uses public-private key cryptography, or passkeys, to avoid these risks and never falls back to phishable factors like OTP, push notifications, or magic links.
While public key cryptography is robust, the safety of private keys is crucial. Beyond Identity utilizes secure enclaves—specialized hardware components that safeguard private keys and prevent unauthorized access or movement. By ensuring all authentications are phishing-resistant and leveraging device-bound, hardware-backed credentials, Beyond Identity provides assurance against phishing attacks.
Prevent Verifier Impersonation
Recognizing legitimate links is impossible for human beings. To address this, Beyond Identity authentication relies on a Platform Authenticator, which verifies the origin of access requests. This method helps prevent attacks that rely on mimicking legitimate sites.
Eliminate Credential Stuffing
Credential stuffing is an attack where bad actors test stolen username and password pairs to attempt to gain access. Typically, the attack is carried out in an automated manner.
Beyond Identity addresses this by eliminating passwords entirely from the authentication process. Our passwordless, phishing-resistant MFA allows users to log in with a touch or glance and supports the broadest range of operating systems on the market, including Windows, Android, macOS, iOS, Linux, and ChromeOS, so users can log in seamlessly no matter what device they prefer to use.
Eliminate Push Bombing Attacks
Push bombing attacks flood users with excessive push notifications, leading to accidental approvals of unauthorized access. Beyond Identity mitigates this risk by not relying on push notifications.
Additionally, our phishing-resistant MFA enables device security checks on every device, managed or unmanaged, using natively collected and integrated third-party risk signals so you can ensure device compliance regardless of the device.
Enforce Device Security Compliance
During authentication, it’s not just the user that’s logging in, it’s also their device. Beyond Identity is the only IAM solution on the market that delivers fine-grained access control that accounts for real-time device risk at the time of authentication and continuously during active sessions.
The first benefit of a platform authenticator is the ability to provide verifier impersonation resistance. The second benefit is that, as an application that lives on the device, it can provide real-time risk data about the device, such as firewall enabled, biometric-enabled, disk encryption enabled, and more.
With the Beyond Identity Platform Authenticator in place, you can have guarantees of user identity with phishing-resistant authentication and enforce security compliance on the device requesting access.
Integrating Risk Signals for Adaptive Access
Given the proliferation of security tools, risk signals can come from various disparate sources ranging from mobile device management (MDM), endpoint detection and response (EDR), Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) tools. Adaptive, risk-based access is only as strong as the breadth, freshness, and comprehensiveness of risk signals that are fed into its policy decisions.
Beyond Identity provides a flexible integration architecture that prevents vendor lock-in and reduces the complexity of admin management and maintenance. Additionally, our policy engine allows for continuous authentication, so you can enforce comprehensive risk compliance even during active sessions.
Ready to experience phishing-resistant security?
Don’t let outdated security measures leave your organization vulnerable when there are solutions available that can dramatically reduce your threat landscape and eliminate credential theft.
With Beyond Identity, you can safeguard access to your critical resources with deterministic security. Get in touch for a personalized demo to see firsthand how the solution works and understand how we deliver our security guarantees.
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