Author: Steven Hope, CEO of Authlogics
When I first started Authlogics there were many ambitions I had for the company, of which consigning passwords to the history books was front and centre. Becoming a billionaire wasn’t necessarily part of the plan, but today that is what I have become, albeit a breach billionaire. Whilst my status may not open as many doors as the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who could with their billions in dollars, the breach billionaire club is much smaller. What’s more my ‘wealth’ is growing at a truly astronomical rate.
At the last count, the Authlogics Password Breach Database contained over 4.5 billion breached credentials, making it the world’s largest vendor-owned breach database. It is the most definitive resource available regarding the password breach status of any live or dormant account. The rate of growth of our database is mirrored in findings from the ForgeRock in its ‘2022 ForgeRock Consumer Identity Breach Report’. The new report suggests that two billion data records containing usernames and passwords were compromised in 2021 and this represents a 35% increase from 2020.
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The problem with talking about numbers so eye wateringly large is that it is easy to get distracted from the core issue, which is that each and every one of those breaches represents a vulnerability that could be exploited by a cybercriminal. Whilst it is true that not all of those breached accounts would ultimately lead to riches, IBM’s ‘Cost of a Data Breach Report’ published in July, highlights why every organisation needs to take data breaches very seriously.
IBM states that data breach costs have risen from an average of $3.86 million to $4.24 million, with loss of business accounting for the largest share of these costs, at an average total cost of $1.59M. Furthermore, whilst business email compromise was responsible for just 4% of breaches, it had the highest average total cost of the 10 initial attack vectors in the study, at $5.01 million.
What I find most troubling is that it is taking 287 days on average to detect a breach. To place that in perspective, if your organisation were breached today, it would not be discovered until mid-May 2023. So, this is where my ‘billionaire’ status affords me the opportunity to be philanthropic as the Authlogics Password Breach Database is totally free to use to any organisation wanting to know its breach status.
For organisations wanting to protect themselves from being a statistic in the next ForgeRock or IBM report, the latest release of our Authlogics Password Security Management provides up-to-date password breach status reporting and proactive fixing of any password problems with automatic remediation, by disabling risky accounts or forcing users to change their password to a safe one. In addition, it comes with a 100% money-back guarantee to reduce password breach risk and lower IT support costs.
Will I ever become a ‘real’ billionaire? Well, if ForgeRock’s predictions are to be believed, then perhaps. The passwordless authentication market is projected to be worth $53 billion by 2030, so maybe I should start looking for the next Necker Island! What’s more, with all money you can save, and prevent your organisations losing, whether from the criminals or the regulators., perhaps you can join me there!
