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Venafi: Five Ways Organizations Use Machine IdentitiesOn May 2, World Password Day reminds consumers to "layer up" their logins by enabling multifactor authentication on their devices and online accounts. Held annually on the first Thursday of May, World Password Day is a collaborative effort supported by dozens of companies, nonprofits and cybersecurity organizations to raise awareness about the importance of improving password security. Through the efforts of World Password Day, millions of internet users across 251 countries have pledged to use better password habits - a good step toward addressing the threat of cybercrime. According to Kevin Bocek, vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence for cybersecurity market leader Venafi, businesses still need to address another growing security concern. "There are two actors on every network: people and machines," said Bocek. "People rely on usernames and passwords to identify themselves to machines so they can gain access to data and services. Machines authenticate themselves and communicate with one another using digital keys and certificates, which serve as machine identities." Every year businesses spend billions of dollars protecting user identities. While the industry invests in many password security awareness events like World Password Day, it spends very little on machine identity protection. Cybercriminals see this vulnerability and target machine identities because they are much more powerful and valuable than human identities. Machine identities are used to protect many types of sensitive machine-to-machine communication; Bocek outlines five ways in which organizations use them:
Additional Resources: Blog: Is World Password Day Forgetting about Another Critical Type of Identity? E-book: Machine Identity Protection for Dummies Blog: How the Explosive Growth of Machines Creates a Machine Identity Crisis About Venafi Venafi is the cybersecurity market leader in machine identity protection, securing machine-to-machine connections and communications. Venafi protects machine identity types by orchestrating cryptographic keys and digital certificates for SSL/TLS, IoT, mobile and SSH. Venafi provides global visibility of machine identities and the risks associated with them for the extended enterprise - on premises, mobile, virtual, cloud and IoT - at machine speed and scale. Venafi puts this intelligence into action with automated remediation that reduces the security and availability risks connected with weak or compromised machine identities while safeguarding the flow of information to trusted machines and preventing communication with machines that are not trusted. With over 30 patents, Venafi delivers innovative solutions for the world's most demanding, security-conscious Global 5000 organizations and government agencies, including the top five U.S. health insurers; the top five U.S. airlines; four of the top five U.S., U.K., Australian and South African banks; and four of the top five U.S. retailers. Venafi is backed by top-tier investors, including TCV, Foundation Capital, Intel Capital, QuestMark Partners, Mercato Partners (News - Alert) and NextEquity. For more information, visit: www.venafi.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190502005125/en/ |