Since October is cybersecurity awareness month, it’s a great time to revisit the question of what are the best ways to secure user authentication in CIAM. In many industries (finance and healthcare, to name a few), regulations require the use of multifactor authentication (MFA) to protect access to sensitive data and transactions.

A recent headline in Wired magazine read “Uber Hack’s Devastation Is Just Starting to Reveal Itself.” There is no corporation that wants that headline and the reputational damage and financial loss it may cause. In the case of Uber it was a relatively simple attack using an approach called Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) fatigue. This is when an attacker takes advantage of authentication systems that require account owners to approve a log in.

OAuth 2.0 is becoming a popular alternative for application authentication. With Microsoft discontinuing Basic authentication and making OAuth 2.0 one of their new standards, many developers are sure to be in a situation where they need to change how they handle authentication for popular applications such as mailboxes, exchange services, and more. This article will briefly touch on OAuth 2.0, how it can be used, and an example of using it read mail from an Office 365 mailbox.

Analytics and data visualizations have the power to elevate a software product, making it a powerful tool that helps each user fulfill their mission more effectively. To stand apart from the competition, today’s software applications need to deliver a lot more than just transaction processing. They must also provide insights that help drive better decisions, alert users to matters that require their attention, and deliver up-to-the-minute information about the things that matter most.

Information technology has been at the heart of governments around the world, enabling them to deliver vital citizen services, such as healthcare, transportation, employment, and national security. All of these functions rest on technology and share a valuable commodity: data. Data is produced and consumed in ever-increasing amounts and therefore must be protected. After all, we believe everything that we see on our computer screens to be true, don’t we?

In this post I will demonstrate how Kafka Connect is integrated in the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP), allowing users to manage and monitor their connectors in Streams Messaging Manager while also touching on security features such as role-based access control and sensitive information handling. If you are a developer moving data in or out of Kafka, an administrator, or a security expert this post is for you. But before I introduce the nitty-gritty first let’s start with the basics.