MFA - Multi-Factor Authentication - Cybers Security Tip of the Week

Hey, everyone. Craig Sixta here with your weekly cybersecurity tip. I've had a lot of requests to talk about multi-factor authentication: what it is, how it works, and how you can use it in both business and personal. Being as a lot of us are at home right now and probably ordering more than ever off the internet, I thought I'd show you how to set it up on amazon.com. The same concept will apply to many of your business sites, your social media, as well as your personal finance banking sites—that sort of thing. Without further ado, let's get started.

The first thing you're going to want to do when you go to amazon.com is go ahead and click on accounts and lists. It will bring you to this site. Click on the middle icon here for login and security, and then, down at the bottom, we're looking for two-step verification. Two-step verification is another way of saying multi-factor authentication. Go ahead and edit that, and then you can read the instructions here. But, for sake of brevity, we'll skip those. We're going to get started. You have two choices here: phone number or authenticator app. For reasons I'm not going to get into today, authenticator app is the way to go; it is more secure. We're going to click on that, and it's asking me to scan a QR code. What you want to do is you want to have an application on your phone. You may have one from work—say Duo, Octa, ofPoint, one of those—or you may have a personal one—Authy, Google Authenticator. But, in this case, I have Authy.

So, here is Authy, and I've already got an Amazon code in there from a previous video, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose ‘add new account’. I choose to scan the QR code, and up comes my camera. All I need to do is hold this camera near that QR code and—that quickly—it pops up with a new account. I go and save that, and it's going to give me a new code. There's my code, and that changes every 30 seconds. I'm going to enter that code into the computer, and I'm going to verify it. If everything works, you get to this, everything's done. I'm going to say, got it, turn on two-step authentication. Perfect. That is all there is to it. What I'm going to demonstrate is I am going to sign out quick, put in my email address, I put in my password, and, this time around, it's going to ask me for the multi-factor authentication code, which once again changes every 30 seconds. I enter this code in—it just changed on me—and what I have the choice of doing here is choosing not to require it on this browser. If this is a computer that you use exclusively, that you have protected, that you know that other people don't share it, you can choose this option and, in the future, it's not going to ask you for that code. You can feel pretty comfortable doing that; that's not a grave concern. If you want to be extra security conscious, you can choose not to, but, in this case, I'm going to set it not to require it every time. I choose sign in, and I'm into my amazon.com account, that simple.

That's really all there is for multi-factor authentication. I would highly recommend; give it a try. Once you figure it out, you're going to realize how easy it is, and it will make you exponentially safer as you're on the internet. Stay healthy, stay safe, and I'll see you next week. Thanks.