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world-of-warcraft-gets-two-factor-authentication

Posted by: admin 15 years, 11 months ago

As we noted way back in 2006 the value in gaming credentials will bring out the fraudsters.. Now Blizzard is offering tokens for WoW. Queue the "If I can get it for WoW, why not my bank" blog posts:

I agree with the sentiment but I wanted to start a conversation regarding why you won't be seeing these tokens in the mail from your bank any time soon. The reason most banks, e-commerce sites, and even corporate VPN connections aren't protected by two-factor authentication can be broken down into a few reasons:

  • cost: additional cost to customer, shipping, inventory, infrastructure, licensing, staff, overhead, etc.
  • complexity: dealing with lost tokens, mistyped numbers causing locked acconts, countless help desk calls, etc. If you are locked out of your WoW account you can't play a game, when you are locked out of your bank account you can't pay bills, transfer funds, check your balance, etc. Simply put, the downside risk of customer convenience is greater than the upside risk of greater levels of security.
  • motive: Blizzard is providing these tokens to help secure customers accounts, but also to further secure their future revenue stream and also to combat piracy and cheating, in short, it makes business sense. Banks don't typically suffer very much if a customer account is breached as they very rarely take the hit themselves but instead either insure against the loss (either federally or privately) or simply passing the costs onto customers.

I will offer up another reason: Stolen credentials are only one of the risks that banks face. They face much tougher threats from man-in-the-middle attacks and malware. Hardware tokens do nothing against such attacks. Online banking will require mutual authentication and eventually, some form of transaction authentication or digital signing. It may well be that the banks are waiting until such security is packaged and offered up by their software providers before investing too much into security.

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