99.9% of hacked accounts don't use 2FA

[Tomcat]

Speaking at the RSA 2021 conference last week, Microsoft experts discussed the problem of account hacking, and also outlined key preventive measures that can save the vast majority of accounts from such a fate.

According to the Microsoft team, every month experts track incidents in which cybercriminals try to compromise user accounts. The tech giant monitors over 30 billion authentication attempts every day.

On average, according to researchers, hackers manage to hack about 0.5% of accounts every month. In terms of numbers, in January 2021, there were 1.2 million such accounts.

And now the most interesting statistic from Microsoft - 99.9% of hacked accounts did not use two-factor authentication (2FA) as a protective measure. For some reason, users are reluctant to activate 2FA, even when it comes to corporate accounts. For example, only 11% of organizational accounts have enabled two-factor authentication.

Microsoft representatives noted that most attacks on accounts are extremely simple: an attacker tries to find frequently used username-password combinations. For example, password spraying attacks resulted in 480,000 hacked accounts in January: