Two-factor authentication (also known as “2FA”) has to do with passwords. When you’re accessing an account that holds important information, you don’t want to make it easy for a hacker to snatch up your account login information.
Unfortunately, many of us don’t want the hassle of some super long, complicated password to have to remember to get into an account! While using passwords is better than having no protection at all, they’re not foolproof.
A recent report looked at over 1.4 billion stolen passwords and found that most were embarrassingly simple. Among the worst are “111111,” “123456,” “123456789,” “qwerty,” and “password.” While these are easy to remember, any decent hacker could crack these simple passwords in no time.
Two-factor authentication (also known as “2FA”) has to do with passwords. When you’re accessing an account that holds important information, you don’t want to make it easy for a hacker to snatch up your account login information.
Unfortunately, many of us don’t want the hassle of some super long, complicated password to have to remember to get into an account! While using passwords is better than having no protection at all, they’re not foolproof.
A recent report looked at over 1.4 billion stolen passwords and found that most were embarrassingly simple. Among the worst are “111111,” “123456,” “123456789,” “qwerty,” and “password.” While these are easy to remember, any decent hacker could crack these simple passwords in no time.
Online users tend to have the habit of reusing the same password across multiple services. This gives hackers opportunity to use the credentials gathered from a data breach (like your username and password). If you have the same combo for all , the hacker is now into all of your accounts.
2FA is an extra layer of security used to make sure that people trying to gain access to an online account are who they say they are. Basically, it just means you verify your identity with an extra step.
You might use a PIN, answers to a “security question”, verify a code, with a text message sent to your phone, etc.
