Making MFA Strides in 2021

Can you believe the New Year is just a few weeks away? Like us, you may be looking back over the successes and learnings of 2021. You're probably also busy planning and budgeting for 2022 projects. Over the past year, LastPass has doubled down on improving our multi-factor authentication technology to provide one easy-to-use application to secure all your endpoints and reduce the risk of a password-related breach. As you plan for 2022, here's what you should know about LastPass MFA and why it should be a central part of your cybersecurity planning in the coming year.

Why multi-factor authentication, and why now?

We're a year and a half into the COVID pandemic, and partial or full-time remote work continues to be the norm. But as companies settle into the work-from-anywhere routine, they're also contending with evolving cyberattacks. Ransomware, phishing attacks, and malware have seen sharp increases in 2021. IT professionals are challenged with securing the company at the user level, safeguarding each access point to corporate data regardless of device, WiFi connection, installed apps, and the many other factors that differ from user to user. In this new era of work, multi-factor authentication is no longer optional. There's a reason cyber insurance companies are now requiring MFA as part of their policies. MFA is one of the most effective ways to slow down and even stop cyberattacks, especially those attacks that rely on stolen, weak, reused, or default passwords to hijack accounts or hack into a corporate network. MFA requires and verifies additional information when a user attempts to access an account, app, or other resources, ensuring only authorized users get through.

A look back at LastPass MFA updates

This year, we focused on streamlining the LastPass MFA experience and adding advanced, customizable features for IT security professionals. Our updates make it quick to deploy LastPass MFA for organization-wide protection with centralized administration and plug-and-play features if you're new to MFA. If you're already using LastPass for multi-factor authentication, this year's updates may help you tweak your company's setup and ensure you're benefiting from all that LastPass MFA has to offer. What was new to MFA in 2021? New! Support for Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP): Now securing endpoints accessed via remote desktop protocol (RDP) to provide a secondary layer of protection on crucial workstations and servers. Workstation MFA: Protects your employee workstations – wherever they are working – with a secondary authentication prompt on top of the workstation password. One, consolidated MFA application: Consolidates the LastPass MFA application and the LastPass Authenticator application into one unified experience to simplify set-up and unlock additional authentication methods, including voice, text, and Yubikey for all endpoints. Universal Proxy 4.0: Delivers improved efficiency, increased scalability, and more authentication methods (including time based 6-digit codes, call, and text-based authentication) when accessing the network via VPN. Identity Provider Protection: Secures Azure AD or AD FS logins with a secondary, multi-factor authentication security check. With cyberthreats increasing at unprecedented rates, it’s more important than ever to protect all endpoints with secure authentication to reduce the risk of a successful data breach. By simply adding a secondary authentication method, businesses can prevent 99.9% of automated, online attacks – greatly reducing their risks. Heading into 2022, MFA should be at the top of your list of priorities for your cybersecurity strategy. LastPass Advanced MFA can help strengthen every access point with unobtrusive, intuitive authentication that IT centrally deploys and manages.