Google: Security Keys Neutralized Employee Phishing
Google has not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical Security Keys in place of passwords and one-time codes, the company told KrebsOnSecurity.
Security Keys are inexpensive USB-based devices that offer an alternative approach to two-factor authentication (2FA), which requires the user to log in to a Web site using something they know (the password) and something they have (e.g., a mobile device).
A Google spokesperson said Security Keys now form the basis of all account access at Google.
"We have had no reported or confirmed account takeovers since implementing security keys at Google," the spokesperson said. "Users might be asked to authenticate using their security key for many different apps/reasons. It all depends on the sensitivity of the app and the risk of the user at that point in time."
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2018, @03:14PM (1 child)
I as going to point out the hypocrisy with Google here, they're using hardware keys, but they purposefully prevent Firefox from accessing Gmail via a yubikey even though they support it on Chrome and Firefox supports Yubikey out of the box.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:58AM
Firefox doesn't support Yubikey though, or more specifically, Firefox does not implement full support for U2F, the open protocol that Gmail requires.
See the four year old bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1065729 [mozilla.org]
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