Dive Brief:
- In higher education institutions, which are more vulnerable to cyberattacks than those in other industries, identifying people by how they type could be another key privacy tool for IT administrators.
- Ed Tech reports keystroke dynamics are a low-cost layer of user authentication that doesn’t require individuals to learn anything new or memorize complicated instructions.
- While malware that logs keystrokes presents a challenge for adoption, KeyTrac CEO Thomas Wölf says no one can type the exact same way twice, meaning identical keystrokes are relatively easy to recognize as coming from a keylogger.
Dive Insight:
Penn State has said it fended off 20 million cyberattacks per day in 2014. Higher education institutions have become more creative in protecting student, faculty, and staff data and identities, but they have a jackpot of information stored in a relatively open environment that invites hackers to try to get in. The power in keystroke dynamics is the ease of use for end users. One key problem of security initiatives is getting stakeholders to follow best practices. Many cases of identity theft are the result of individuals simply giving their passwords away when they are tricked into thinking the request comes from a safe source. As an additional authentication, perhaps keystroke dynamics is the answer.