Why Two Factor Authentication matters.

With cyber-crime and internet fraud on the rise, it has become more important to safeguard your data. The most common types of breach are password related (81% of hacking-related breaches leveraged either stolen and/or weak passwords. — Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report 2017), normally gathered with phishing scams.
One way is to protect against password theft is with 2 Factor Authentication (2FA), which requires two steps in the verification process. This makes the act of stealing your information much more difficult. Most commonly 2FA introduces a second layer of identification to enable log in, this can be and authenticator app on your phone, a finger print scan, or the card reader the bank sends you for online banking. Having access to your password is no longer enough for a criminal to log into your account.

As with any change there are challenges that businesses might face when implementing 2FA. Traditionally this might have included providing users with a mobile phone, but today’s climate is such that most people have a mobile that they are willing to use for work even if it’s not provided by them. The most common issue, is getting the employees to understand why 2FA is important.
Many systems already use 2FA, so we are starting to find that users are becoming used to the extra steps, for example; an ATM requires a PIN and the card, and online banking requires a username and password and then sends a verification code via email or text.
An extra step of verification can take a few minutes, but this time drastically falls when users become accustomed to a practice. 2FA is now quick and easy to implement. Most systems take as little as two seconds to transfer a verification code.
The extra time taken makes it harder for identity theft (According to a study by cyber security firm Symantec, 80% of data breaches could be eliminated using 2FA) to happen to you, which in the long run seems worth the effort to us!