Professional and finance companies leave IT security to chance

According to a survey conducted by SecureAuth, organisations in the professional and financial service industry are trusting only one layer of defence to protect their assets. The reliance on single-factor authentication – such as a password or token – leaves companies’ extremely vulnerable to data breaches from both internal and external threats.

Findings reveal that the majority of professional and financial services companies (75%) were confident their access security was adequate to protect their company assets. However, the evidence points to a misplaced confidence, with a third of companies using passwords (34%) as the sole form of security access.

Only two-in-five companies in the sector (21%) plan to introduce two-factor authentication alongside passwords. In addition, only 30% of companies ask their employees to change their credentials three times a year or less. Almost half (47%) of all employees regularly access their IT systems from three or more different devices in the average week – more than any other sector studied. 16% of financial companies still admitted that they had only one method in place to control remote access, meaning they had little way to verify if the user was genuine.

The SecureAuth study also reveals that a quarter (24%) of professional and financial services companies plan to change their access security in the next five-years away from passwords only. But many are finding that tokens – such as tags or pass cards – are becoming increasingly unpopular, with the industry expecting a slump from 19% usage across the sector today, to less than 4% in five years’ time.