I’ve been going through updating all of my accounts (passwords, 2FA, etc.), and I’ve noticed that there are a lot of sites that don’t offer any form of MFA.
I can understand smaller services that might not have the bandwidth, but surely larger organisations are able to get this setup?
The worst here are financial institutions. What do I want the most security on? My money.
I get that they have regulations, but it annoys me all the time.
The worst part of those is when they do support 2FA, but it’s text-only. No app authentication or hardware key option.
Like it’s something, but it’s easily the least secure option, and probably the most expensive since it requires operating an additional SMS portal for those codes.
As a developer who has worked on similar systems, I can see why it likely ended up that way. Not justifying it, only understanding it.
In the case of banks, it’s likely that;
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They needed to make 2FA mandatory for all customers, rather than opt-in. This means they needed an MFA method which a person of any technical competency can use. SMS is the “lowest common denominator” here, so they chose it.
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The cost of sending SMS messages is high, but banks are (unsurprisingly) rich and can afford it
It would be great if banks offered better MFA methods, but development time in old-school banks is often ridiculously long as it is a very risk-averse industry that is also slowed down a lot by bureaucracy. It’s likely they would choose something else on the roadmap, and stick with SMS as simply “good enough”
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SMS 2fa on banks is not as bad as you’d think.
- They settled on SMS before there really were choices, and banks are slow to change
- Banks long since realized SMS was inadequate and use additional security. I imagine all banks in US, but certainly the biggest ones, invested in profiling software that looks at your behavior and device to rate every transaction by additional risk factors. They’re already pretty confident nothing bad is going on
Pornhub has better account security than my bank, which ONLY has an option for a 6-digit numeric password, with no 2fa at all
This one I can understand, if something somehow goes wrong with your 2FA you’re locked out of your money
No you’re not?! You seriously think the bank would just say “nope. No 2FA you’re fucked all your monies are ours now”.
yeah that’s fair, I wasn’t thinking lol
Not if you can walk into a branch.
Not every financial institution has brick and mortar locations.
I know, which is why I said IF.
Because they don’t feel like it and aren’t required to
Just copy paste that for literally any “why aren’t more companies doing (X thing that makes sense and better protects the consumer)?” questions.
- it takes engineering time which is not a trivial cost - accounts and identity for large orgs tend to be a lot more complex than you might think - there will likely be a few different identity stores, and multiple systems that query those stores; making sure every possible permutation works correctly can be a bit undertaking
- It adds additional load to their support teams which is very expensive
The support one is a real killer for a lot of places; I’ve worked with a place that had a few million paying customers, and ~half of those were in a tier where a single 30 minute support call would completely negate any revenue that that customer would bring in for the year. Email support was slightly less expensive, but would still be a significant proportion of your annual profit
I was going to mention the support aspect. I believe some TOTP 2FA applications have automatic online backups by default but some don’t and require users to make their own backups. I can only imagine how challenging it would be to deal with users who have locked themselves out of their account due to their 2FA setup.
I had to go through that with itch.io a while back and had to verify my most recent purchases to recover my account. It was nice I was able to get it back but that in itself could be a security concern.
https://2fa.directory A directory of common sites that offer (or don’t offer) 2FA, which and how. I agree it should be a default feature. But maybe harvesting your full ID credentials is more juicy to many companies
That’s a super useful site, thank you!
The larger the organization, the larger their resources, but also usually the greater their complexity and legacy burdens. Large organizations also move slowly. All of this can delay things long after we might think they ought to have happened.
