Trusted Identities in Cyberspace Are More Important than Ever

Posted: November 17th, 2016

By Jeremy Grant

Jeremy Grant is a Managing Director at The Chertoff Group, where he works with the firm's clientele to develop growth strategies, identify market solutions, and advise on policy impacts across information technology, cybersecurity and government services. On Friday, Grant will moderate a panel at The Chertoff Group's Security Series event in Washington, exploring how to best improve identity and trust online in addition to what steps the next Administration should take to drive the adoption of better identity solutions online.

It’s hard today to find a major breach where weak identity solutions did not provide the vector of attack.

More than 21 million personnel records – including details of my background check and images of my fingerprints – were stolen last year from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) because of passwords. More recently, passwords enabled a foreign power to hack into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and attempt to influence the U.S. presidential campaign. Passwords were exploited over the last three years to perpetrate major attacks on Target, Anthem, JP Morgan Chase, and Sony, among others. As my colleague Michael Chertoff recently stated, “the password is by far the weakest link in cybersecurity today.”

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