Bell Labs, the Colonial Pipeline and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

This article has been indexed from Security Boulevard

A simple technology invented by Bell Labs over 20 years ago (and widely used today) could have prevented the Colonial Pipeline attack.

In 1880, the French government awarded Alexander Graham Bell roughly the equivalent of $300K as a prize for inventing the telephone. He used the award to fund the research laboratory that became colloquially known as Bell Labs. If you’re not familiar with Bell Labs, you should be. In the 140+ years that followed, researchers at Bell Labsinvented radio astronomy, transistors, lasers, solar cells, information theory, and UNIX, just to name a few of the many accomplishments. Among the many prestigious awardsgranted to Bell Labs researchers are nine Nobel prizes and twenty-two IEEE Medals of Honor.

In 1998, I joined AT&T Labs, which was a research group that the company retained when they spun out most of Bell Labs to Lucent Technologies in 1996. I was a Web Application developer; one of the least technical roles in the Labs. If I ever thought for a moment that I knew technology, I was quickly humbled when I built an app that tracked the Labs’ actually importantprojects. The experience of working in the Labs stuck with me in the form of humility and curiosity. I accepted that I may never be the foremost expert in any given technology and I assumed the mindset of a forever student. Even today, I constantly question what I think I know because there are always holes in my knowledge or perspectives that I haven’t seen.

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