Google Urges Adwords Clients to Use 2FA Keys

Having acquired some empirical validation of second-factor authentication, Google is now urging its Adwords partners to adopt such security measures.

Adwords is one of the biggest digital advertising programs in the world, and as such Google is keen to ensure that customers using its service have some essential security in place to mitigate the threat of digital ad hacking. So the company has worked with longtime partner Yubico to provide two big clients with the latter’s YubiKey security keys – USB devices that let users authenticate from their laptops and computers with the touch of a button.

The 2FA or, in Google’s parlance, 2Sv (“Two Step Verification”) keys were offered to Jellyfish, a global marketing agency that has worked with major brands like Nestle, National Geographic, and Zipcar; and to iProspect, a UK-based digital marketing agency. And while hard data on the impact of these keys isn’t yet available, the organizations are already reporting enthusiastically on the ease of use and security confidence the YubiKeys have enabled, with Jellyfish PPC Director Richard Hartley asserting that it has even helped the firm to win over new clients, according to a Google Adwords blog post.

The deployments arrive soon after the conclusion of a two-year Google study looking at the effectiveness of 2FA/2SV security, which found that such solutions offered the best mix of deployability and usability compared to passwords, OTP, and SMS verification methods.

Sources: Yubico, Google