This Is What Internet Security Looks Like

Security KeyHav­ing recent­ly lis­tened to the series on mul­ti-part authen­ti­ca­tion on the Secu­ri­ty Now! pod­cast (par­tic­u­lar­ly episodes 90 and 103), I got this (very inex­pen­sive) Pay­Pal brand­ed secu­ri­ty key to use with my eBay and Pay­Pal accounts. The device is actu­al­ly made by Verisign and they are cur­rent­ly test­ing it’s use with OpenID. I would­n’t have pre­vi­ous­ly rec­om­mend­ed this for most peo­ple, but after read­ing today’s news about bot­net attacks on eBay, I think that pret­ty much every­one should spend the $5 and get one of these.

Published

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

3 comments

  1. Because I like gad­getry I’m sore tempt­ed to do this. How­ev­er, I don’t real­ly use Pay­Pal any­more so there appar­ent­ly is no point.

    This makes me sad.

  2. I would still rec­om­mend it because of being able to tie it into OpenID via Verisign Labs. OpenID is get­ting wider adop­tion across many online ser­vices. The Verisign brand­ed secu­ri­ty keys are cur­rent­ly $30, where­as Pay­Pal is sub­si­diz­ing most of that for their users.

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