Users set and manage their passwords and, despite massive investments in education, continue to reuse the same ones across multiple systems. A joint study by MasterCard and the University of Oxford found that 21% of users forget passwords after two weeks, and 25% forget one password at least daily.

Any compromise of a password creates the potential for credentials to be harvested and used to infiltrate your organization to perpetrate ransomware and other deadly attacks on crown-jewel assets. This can happen on an Internet-facing system or during lateral movement when hackers are looking to infiltrate their way deeper into an organization. Malicious actors can also purchase these credentials in bulk to attempt credential stuffing attacks (according to Forbes, 15B passwords were stolen from 100K different breaches in 2020 alone).

Today, modern techniques such as MFA fatigue (e.g., push bombing), man-in-the-middle, and SIM swapping attacks utilize impersonation and deception to defeat MFA methods that rely on smartphones or mobile devices to complete. Passwordless Authentication slashes the attack surface, delights users and pays for itself in the first year with saving on employee and IT downtime due to password resets.