RSA & Zimperium: Enhancing the Security of Multifactor Authentication

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For decades, RSA® has been a leader in trusted identity and access management solutions that have kept organizations around the world safe from cyber threats. The company’s ability to adapt and innovate around an evolving threat landscape has been a large part of maintaining this prolonged leadership position – and it’s exhibiting this agility once again.

Today, RSA introduced Mobile Lock, a new feature developed in partnership with Zimperium that’s built into the RSA Authenticator mobile application to provide a new layer of protection around authenticating users into a secure environment.

There’s no hiding from the increasing threat mobile devices pose to enterprise security. In Verizon’s most recent Mobile Security Index report, nearly half (45%) of the enterprise security pros surveyed said their organization experienced a mobile-related compromise – twice as many as the year before. And according to Zimperium’s 2022 Global Mobile Threat Report, zero-day attacks against mobile devices rose 466% in 2021, accounting for one in three in-the-wild attacks on endpoints.

With the continued prevalence of hybrid and remote work, enterprise users are relying more heavily on mobile devices and creating a target-rich environment of unprotected endpoints for attackers. All mobile devices – but especially those that are employee-owned and unmanaged by the enterprise – present a growing risk that organizations need to recognize and take steps to mitigate with every facet of their security strategy.

This is exactly why adding an extra layer of security when authenticating users via a mobile device is a critical step to strengthening an organization’s overall security posture. Ensuring that a user’s mobile device is secure before granting access to a secure environment should be a core component of any Zero Trust architecture – and Zimperium can help make sure that it is.

RSA Mobile Lock embeds the Zimperium z9 mobile threat defense engine into the RSA authenticator mobile app, enhancing security for the millions of enterprise users who rely on it to access secure environments. z9 is Zimperium’s patented, dynamically updatable engine that uses behavioral and machine learning techniques to detect device, network, phishing, and application mobile attacks on-device and in real time. And because of z9’s ability to operate completely on-device, without a need to rely on cloud-based lookups, content scanning, or other privacy-invasive techniques, it provides important peace of mind across personal and corporate-managed devices.

When Mobile Lock detects a threat with the z9 engine, it can prevent users from authenticating into a secured environment until the threat is resolved. It can also simultaneously alert IT admins about the issue for important enterprise security visibility.

The growing risk that mobile devices pose to enterprise environments is very real. RSA understands these risks and is doing everything possible to ensure that it continues to provide the highest degree of security to its customers. RSA Mobile Lock is a market first for building extra layers of mobile security into multifactor authentication processes – but rest assured, it won’t be the last.

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