07.26.2018 - Interview with The Last Watchdog
Interview with The Last Watchdog – “MY TAKE: Here’s why identities are the true firewalls, especially as digital transformation unfolds” Optimal IdM speaks with Byron Acohido at The Last Watchdog about dynamic authentication management that can weed out threat actors, without slowing digital transformation. ...
07.25.2018 - Optimal IdM Partners with Biometric Firm TypingDNA To Extend MFA Offering
Optimal IdM, a leading provider of Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions, today announced it has partnered with TypingDNA to bring customers a secure biometric option as part of their multi-factor authentication (MFA) solution. TypingDNA’s behavioral biometrics can identify people based on how they type either on a mobile or desktop platform. This is a secondary form of login authentication for users who enter their email address and password. “Having this kind of behavioral authentication extends our MFA offering and strengthens our portfolio,” said Chris Curcio, VP of Channel Sales and Partnerships at Optimal IdM. “We are very excited about our partnership with TypingDNA because of the ease of use and quick implementation they bring to our customer’s current applications.” Raul Popa, CEO of TypingDNA, had this to say about the new partnership, “We are delighted to join Optimal IdM in the mission to accelerate the availability of a ‘no more painful’ authentication. An increasing number of people are and will be authenticated by something they already are naturally doing, such as typing.” ...
07.23.2018 - Manufacturers Need Industrial-Quality Access Control
Ideas about cybersecurity in the manufacturing sector have started to change, and it’s about time. Until recently, a common misperception among those in the industrial world was that that they had little to attract hackers—no credit card data, no health records, no bitcoin. But manufacturers do have data, and it’s immensely valuable — their trade secrets. Profit isn’t the only motivation for hackers many just want to cause chaos. There are plenty of reasons for hackers to attack manufacturing systems; the proof is that one out of three industrial control systems (ICS) computers were hacked last year (Kaspersky Lab, Sept 2017). That number seems daunting. Many industrial automation systems have only limited internet connectivity, if at all. But they are connected to their corporate networks, and that’s where the weakness lies. Only half of manufacturing businesses isolate their ICS networks from their corporate networks (www.ncms.org/CyberSecurityReport). The rest are the mercy of the same phishing, ransomware, and insider attacks as any financial or healthcare organization. One vulnerability that affects manufacturers in particular is poor security practices among their vendors. It just takes one weak partner to infect an entire supply chain. Hackers are efficient criminals; they conduct research using Lexis Nexis, LinkedIn, and even dumpster dive to learn what they need to know to launch the most effective attack possible against their target of choice. If they want to attack your business, they may learn who your vendors are, choose those they suspect to be the weakest¾which may be a mom-and-pop shop, or may be a larger business that has a reputation on the dark web as an easy takedown¾and breach the weak vendor in order to hop onto your network. Security professionals like to say, “Security is people.” The average worker at a bank or hospital is highly aware that their employer is a high-value target, so they are more cautious than those in other industries about clicking on links or opening attachments. The average worker in an industrial business may not be as guarded. Security awareness training is a step in the right direction, but not all workers will take it seriously. Even if every worker did keep security at top-of-mind, humans still make mistakes. It just takes one accidental click to open the door to malware. And once inside, it may make its way to whatever target its authors desire. That could be your trade secrets, or it could be the main controllers in your automation system. ...
07.12.2018 - Preventing Disaster Through Early IAM Adoption
Solutions Review discusses “Preventing Disaster Through Early IAM Adoption” with Mark Foust of Optimal IdM. Driving factors to IAM adoption like federation, multifactor authentication, governance, open standards, etc. are discussed. View the article, “Experts Discuss Digital Identity Security at Identiverse 2018” and view the video. ...
07.5.2018 - Troubleshooting Federation with Fiddler
Fiddler is simply the best tool to debug federation issues. Optimal IdM has just released a White Paper on this which you can download on the left side of this page. In this blog we will cover how to use Fiddler to debug WS-Federation issues. The URI for a relying party or identity provider may be in the form of a URL (such as http://my.test.com) or a URN (urn:my.test.com). URIs (both URNs and URLs) are case sensitive when used for Federation. For URLs in the form of URIs, every “/” is part of the name as is the protocol. When used as a URI the URLs http://my.test.com, http://my.test.com/, https://my.test.com, and https://my.test.com/ would all be considered different URIs. ...
