Bad guys are after your data. You’ve probably already been the victim of a data breach. Your passwords are probably compromised. How can you possibly hope to keep your data to yourself?
Multi-factor (or two-factor) authentication can help.
What does that mean? Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is what it sounds like, multiple means of verifying that you are actually you. For our purposes, the first factor is your username and password (something you know), the additional factors are things like a YubiKey, Google Titan, authentication app (something you have), bio-metrics (something you are), or any combination of these.
I highly recommend using a hardware product like a YubiKey or Google Titan, it makes the authentication process much faster, but you should also use an authenticator app on your mobile like Microsoft Authenticator, or Bitwarden. When buying keys, you’ll want two or more (I have 5), one to keep on you, the other to keep in a secure location – in case one gets lost, stolen, or broken.
Do this first!
The most important account you can enable MFA on is your email. Think about it, every time you click the “I forgot my password” link, the first thing most services do is send you a link in an email. If a bad guy gets access to your email, it’s game over, they have access to EVERYTHING linked to that email account. To enable MFA on your email accounts here are some quick links to the major players:
Google/Gmail
Microsoft/Outlook/Hotmail
Yahoo!
AOL
It may seem silly but…
If you use Facebook or Twitter to sign into other services you’ll want to enable MFA on those accounts as well:
Facebook
Twitter
Where to buy:
You can purchase a Yubikey or Google Titan here:
Authentication Apps
While there are other authentication apps, I prefer Microsoft Authenticator or Bitwarden because they also offers a free password manager with sync so you can make all your passwords long, strong, and unique for every website. The unique part is important, if one account does suffer a breach, they can’t reuse that password to try and log into any of your other accounts – this is critically important for services that don’t yet offer MFA.
Microsoft Authenticator
Bitwarden
Google Authenticator
Twilio Authy