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What are Authenticator Apps for?

What are Authenticator Apps?

Are you who you say you are? Prove it, twice!

Most people and companies already know that protecting your cyber identity with a single identity verification factor, such a password, is not enough these days. Hackers are very creative on the methods and techniques they use to capture passwords to access your company or personal information. If that is not enough, according to Pew Research Center, 39% of American Internet users use the same password for multiple online accounts (work or personal). A password hacked on a personal account could be the door to steal sensitive data in your company.

Two-step verification or two-factor authentication is a security process to better protect users and company resources by asking users to verify identity in two ways.  According to techradar.com; Authenticator Apps are gaining popularity as they, not only add an extra layer of online security, but also provide ONE place to access and manage your authentication software tokens which are “auto-generated one-time passwords (OTP) which expire within 30 seconds.  The very short timeframe makes it nearly impossible for hackers to grab someone’s second credential and use it before it becomes inactive forever”.

There are many authenticator app choices now available, including Google’s own Google Authenticator and MS’ Microsoft Authenticator, which are both free to the user.  In addition to these, here is a list of other top-rated apps according to techradar.com:

  • Authenticator App by 2 Stable
  • Authy
  • Duo
  • LastPass Authenticator
  • Step Two
  • TOTP Authenticator