Congress told Breaches, Sharing Spell End of Authentication by What We Know

The article summarizes testimony to the House Energy and Commerce Committee arguing that massive data breaches and widespread data aggregation have rendered knowledge-based authentication (passwords, mother’s maiden name, SSNs) insecure. Experts cited breaches affecting hundreds of millions of records (e.g., Equifax, Uber), warned that breached data can be combined into detailed identity profiles, and recommended stronger authentication technologies and legislative limits on use of government identifiers and credit bureau practices.