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How To Make People Sit Up And Use 2-Factor Authentication

posted by chromas on Thursday March 07 2019, @05:40AM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In a presentation at this year's RSA Conference, taking place in San Francisco this week, Dr L Jean Camp, a professor at Indiana University Bloomington in the US, and her doctoral candidate Sanchari Das, detailed their research into why people aren't using Yubico security keys or Google’s hardware tokens for multi-factor authentication (MFA).

For those who don't know: typically, you use these gadgets to provide an extra layer of security when logging into systems. You enter your username and password as usual, then plug the USB-based key into your computer and tap a button to activate it. The thing you're trying to log into checks the username and password are correct, and that the physical key is valid and tied to your account, before letting you in.

That means a crook has to know your username and password, and have your physical key to log in as you. We highly recommend you investigate activating MFA on your online accounts, particularly important ones such as your webmail.

What the pair found during their research work derails any previous assumptions that the lack of MFA uptake is because people are stupid, or can't use the technology. What it comes down to is education and communicating risk.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @11:48AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @11:48AM (#811105)

    It's gotten to the point even my friends don't want to give their credit card information to companies.

    I don't either. I use paypal for this shit and then at least I can authorize transactions. There are otherwise very few places I grant CC access to. I even use paypal to pay airline tickets... just few months after doing that one of these airlines leaked all their CC data, so fuck them. Paypal only (or Amazon or Google). At least you can keep your CC info less distributed.

    What amazes me is that Visa, MC or AMEX are too stupid to actually process CC transactions via their sites and this allows PayPal to exist. How retarded are these companies? They still live in 1980s or something?

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  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday March 07 2019, @04:19PM

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Thursday March 07 2019, @04:19PM (#811175)

    Paypal builds rockets. What do the banks build? Don't complain!