OK.. I am going to tell you today about one of the best kept secrets to protecting your PayPal and eBay accounts. What, you don't have a PayPal or eBay account? You have got to be kidding me. You definitely need to check those out. Well for those of you that do, have you ever thought about what would happen if someone hacked your account? It could be aweful. And if someone put a keylogger on your computer, or if you are accessing the account from a more public computer how are you going to make sure your account is safe? All they have to do is record your user ID and password and they can get in.
Well there is an easy way to take care of this. It is called two factor authentication. What is that? Well you have your user id and password, then you get a device you need to use when you log in. There are a few ways to do it, smartcards, keyfobs, or even fingerprint scan or face recognition. The key is that it is all about something you know and something you have.
PayPal (and it's parent company eBay) have put in place the ability to use two factor authentication. I stumbled on it by accident when I was at a computer show recently. I was told about it from the vendor that supplies the devices for PayPal. After a bunch of searching on their site I found out how to get setup.
So here is the deal. You log into PayPal and then go to http://www.paypal.com/securitykey to get to the page to set yourself up. It was a real bear to find it, trust me. Anyway, you then register and pay $5 for the device (that is way cheaper than what they cost). Then within about 10 days you will get your security key in the mail. You log back into PayPal, go to that same link above, and activate the key. Once this is done when you log in you first will be asked for your user ID and password. Then the next page will ask you for the six digit number from the security key. You press a button and a number is generated. It is different every time. You put that in and complete the login. Now if someone gets your user ID and password they still cannot get in. Because they must have that security key to get a valid number.
Now I know some of you might be saying like "what if I lose it or do not have it with me?". Well they have a way to get in for onesy twosy times. But you should use the key as often as you can.
Oh, the other thing that is nice is that you can use the same key for eBay. It rocks. Now I don't have people getting on my eBay account and bidding on a bunch of stuff I am not going to buy and totally messing up my account (or worse). Later this week I will put together a video of this and post it. But I wanted to let you all know about this best kept secret that PayPay and eBay should be advertising on their front page. I also wonder when places like banks will get wise and start offering something like this?
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Blizzard also offers a $6.50 doo-dad for adding two-factor authentication to your World of Warcraft account.
ReplyDeleteThere have been lots of cases of people's accounts being hacked by a password-stealing trojan - sometimes through malicious adds on the web sites offering third-party addons to WoW, and sometimes through an addon-management channel which auto-updates addons as they are tweaked to work with each WoW patch.
You'd think it's overkill to protect an imaginary online character, but each high-level item can represent dozens of hours dedicated to earning them. However, and this caveat might apply to eBay/PayPal as well, I've heard rumours that they don't work reliably.