Consumer two-factor authenticating service Authy just announced that it’s surpassed 1 million unique users.
That may not seem like a big deal, but it could point to a trend in the way consumers interface with the Web. Authy is a service that enables users to better secure their many accounts, such as Gmail, Facebook, Dropbox, LastPass, Evernote, and Amazon. It integrates with over 1,000 websites and has plugins for the domains it doesn’t integrate with directly.
In a blog post, the company noted that it started 2014 with 320,714 users and has since ballooned to over one million.
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Traditionally users and developers are averse to inputting security measures, because they see it as an impediment to the user experience. But this has been a particularly bad year for security. In fact, Authy’s announcement comes as news arrives that a stolen user name and password were the cause of the Home Depot breach that compromised 56 million credit cards. The credentials were stolen from one of Home Depot’s vendors, not unlike the Target breach, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Authy thinks the sudden rise in two-factor authentication use marks a turning point for security on the Web and maybe beyond. “[S]oon passwords by themselves will be irrelevant and our apps and data will be more secure,” the company writes in the post.
We can only hope so.
