It's October, so it's National Cybersecurity Awareness Month! And one of the main themes for this year's edition is multi-factor authentication: login protection by using more authentication factors than just the password. The second factor could be a variety of things - an SMS code, a hardware key, a code generator.
And just how good these additional factors are? A fresh study from Google, the New York University and the University of California, San Diego, found how incredibly effective adding a second factor is. Just adding any second factor (like the comparatively weak SMS code) blocks 100% of automated bots, 99% of phishing attacks and 90% of targeted attacks. The study found the safest solution is a hardware security key: accounts protected by these tokens were completely impervious to all kinds of attacks, and during the study no successful attacks were conducted against them.
What's even better news: multi-factor authentication is not rocket science anymore. Decades of development and evolution brought this technology to extremely affordable price points, with simplicity and ease of use to match. When accounts are protected en masse by 2FA tools like One Identity Defender using hardware tokens like Yubico's incredibly popular Yubikeys, companies have no excuses left to avoid introducing a layer of protection this effective.
To find out more about the wide variety of hardware and software tokens One Identity Defender supports, check out our product page.
