Free two factor authentication for Paypal, eBay and others

VIP Access on a Blackberry

Do you use eBay or PayPal?  Ever wondered what happens when your account gets hacked? Credentials for both services are some of the most valuable “assets” available in the underground economy (we publish details in the Internet Security Threat Report ).  Yesterday I discovered that there is a free way using one of our recently acquired technologies to provide sophisticated but easy to use protection for them.

As part of our acquisition of VeriSign security business we acquired the software based One Time Pass-code solution called VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP) this includes a software solution that runs on your smart phone (Blackberry, iPhone, HTC, Nokia, Palm, etc.) and turns it into a security token. Every 30 seconds your device generates a unique pass-code that websites, applications, VPNs etc. can use to provide a secondary factor of authentication in addition to your regular password/PIN.

VIP Access on an iPhone

The B2C sites that use this include PayPal and eBay but there are many more although most are US based.  To get VIP onto your blackberry go here, fill out your number and a download URL and instructions will be sent by text.  If you have an iPhone you will find the free app in the iTunes Store here for other devices refer to this page, or for most devices including Blackberry you can go directly on your device to m.verisign.com.

Once you have downloaded your VIP client you will need to register it with PayPal and eBay or the other services that use it.  This takes just over 30 seconds as you have to enter two consecutive pass-codes.

Of course exactly the same technology leveraging the smart-phone based client and cloud based authentication can be used by businesses to provide B2B or B2E 2 factor authentication for remote access, CRM and line of business applications.