Last month, a company got breached. The attackers waltzed through their systems like they owned the place. Every single user had multi-factor authentication enabled.

The CISO looked across the conference table and said the words I hear too often: “But we thought MFA was supposed to protect us.”

Multi-factor authentication is no longer the silver bullet we once believed it to be. While it’s still an essential security layer, treating it as your final defense is like using a screen door to protect a bank vault.

For years, cybersecurity experts have preached the gospel of MFA. Enable two-factor authentication everywhere. Use authenticator apps. Get those hardware tokens. We’ve been telling people that MFA reduces account breaches by 99.9%.

That statistic isn’t wrong. But it’s also not the complete picture.

The problem is that cybercriminals have evolved. They’ve moved beyond simple password attacks. Today’s sophisticated threat actors don’t try to guess your password. They don’t even care about your carefully crafted 16-character passphrase with symbols and numbers.

Instead, they’re targeting the human element and the technology gaps that MFA can’t address.