With more and more of our life headed to the cloud, ensuring solid security is more important than ever. With everyone from big corporations like Sony to porn sites and online games suffering the indignity of security breaches in the past year, it is clear that one needs to be incredibly careful about how they manage their online lives. With more and more software being released that lets you access cloud applications from multiple devices, security becomes even more important.
When it comes to apps that run on all of our devices, Dropbox is one of the most important, acting as a centralised storage pool that makes accessing data easy. Following a recent breach that resulted in spamming of some users, Dropbox announced that it would be implementing a two factor authentication process.
This two factor security is now live and can be turned on from the settings page on the dropbox website. When you do you get the option of either receiving a unique code via text message whenever you need to log in, or to generate the code using either Google Authenticator, Amazon AWS MFA or Windows Phone Authenticator.
This code is used in conjunction with your password when logging on. It does make the process a touch more annoying but it means that your data should be secure, even if someone gets their hands on your password. It does mean that if you lose your phone you won’t be able to access your account – in this case Dropbox supplies a 16 digit code that it suggests you write down and keep. This code can then be used to remove the two factor authentication from the account if you ever end up in this situation.
As with all two-factor authentication methods, we heartily recommend activating this on your account. Given the sheer frequency of data breaches online, any way of making your accounts more secure should be taken advantage of.
