How to set up Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) for all your accounts

pretty much every time we sign in to any of our online accounts these days we are asked by that account to set up two-factor authentication because the account tells us that we're more secure if we set up two-factor authentication now you may have set up two-factor authentication already and in which case i applaud you but you may not have set up two-factor authentication yet in which case i encourage you to watch this video because i'm going to show you what two-factor authentication is tell you why it's important show you how to set it up and most importantly give you some tips so that when you move devices you aren't perpetually screwed by using two-factor authentication and then not having done what you should be doing to protect yourself like somebody i know that would be me a long story i'll share with you in just a moment that's today on dottotech [Music] steve dotto here how the heck are you doing this fine day and as promised today on dottotech we're going to be talking about two-factor or two-step authentication it's a topic we've talked about occasionally in the past but i've got a bit of a fresh take today to share with you as well based on some recent personal experience which i hope you can all avoid more on that in a few moments let's start with what is two-factor authentication two-factor authentication is a protocol well i think it's a protocol but it's a it's a thing that we use on the internet to verify that we are who we say we are when we're about to log into our account think about two factors what are two factors we need when you go to log into an account say a bank account or an email account what do you need you need your username and password those are the first factor the our username and password those would be factor one the second factor is a code that is generated that proves that we are who we say we are that code has to be generated on a device which is isolated from factor one from the say the just the password manager that we're using to manage our username and password it's a device like our smartphone which is the perfect design advice for two-factor authentication because it is in our possession and it is uniquely ours somebody hacking into our account if they are trying to get into our account and maybe they've managed to steal our username and password that would be bad would it not but our bacon would be saved if we had two-factor authentication turned on because when they go to sign in they would put in the username and password and say i'm about to enter steve's account and then the site says okay give me the second factor tell me from your phone the secret code that you have on your phone that will allow me to add that will allow you into our account and the thief goes oh no curses filed again by two-factor authentication that's what it does for us it's pretty simple it's elegant to use uh there are a variety of tools we can use to set it up and i'm gonna share those with you right now so let's dive in to setting up two-factor authentication there are a couple of different ways that we can generate our two-factor authentication codes when we set up our two-factor authentication on any of our accounts you can have a text sent to your phone from the account which will allow you to gain access that's probably the least secure way of setting up two-factor authentication for most of us the most popular way is having an application a authentication application on our computer google authenticator is one of the most popular i'm going to show you that but i'm also going to show you one that's that's included with my password manager lastpass authenticator because some people just don't trust google so this gives you an option there's another way that two-factor authentication can occur which i think confuses some people and that is through a related app on your phone for example if you're signing into your gmail account your gmail account in acquiring two-factor authentication and requiring it might send the uh the the authentication code through to the gmail app on your smartphone in which case it will come up with a message saying is this you coming in and you just say yes so it again we're still using the second factor our smartphone in our other account or could be our tablet in that particular case but the same basic process is happening we are signing in to an account we give them factor one username password they say prove you who you are through your mobile device either through a code that we send to your app or a text that we send to you or a code that you send to us from a authorized authenticator app like google authenticator or lastpass authenticator i hope that all makes sense let's walk through the process of setting it up and if it doesn't make sense now it will by the end of today's video i promise you plus you're going to want to stick around to the end because there's one thing which you have to pay attention to which will jump you up and bite you in the ass when you go to switch phones in the future if you don't prepare for it right from the beginning okay are you ready step one on your smartphone or tablet go and download an authenticator app this is probably the easiest way to proceed you can download google authenticator or you can download another authenticator app i also have lastpass authenticator installed we're going to do our first setup using google authenticator to show you the setup often when you log into an account it will say you don't have two-factor authentication set up would you like to in which case you can do it at that moment or you can go into your security settings and you can set up two-factor authentication within any app so here within in this particular case paypal we're going to set it up it says protect your account with two-step verification use an authenticator app i'm going to say yes use an authenticator app now this is very cool actually i really enjoy doing this it uses a qr code in order to create the initial connection so how you do this is back on your google authenticator app on your smartphone or any authenticator app you hit the plus key and it says scan a qr code so we're going to scan it in you point your phone at the computer and look at that it instantly has the paypal authorization code all set up so i'm just going to type that in so that it wants to verify it right away and that verification has now received the information from google authenticator and now two-step verification is turned on on my paypal account so if we want to see how that's going to work now in the future when i go to sign in let's log out and let's go back here to paypal i go log in and it's going to say okay what's your new username and password i have that in my password manager i put that in and it says wait a minute what's your security code remember what i said to you a hacker somebody has stolen my username and password they try and enter they are foiled at this point because they don't have the authenticator app on my smartphone i have it here i type in the code and we are off to the races and i am in to my account isn't that a thing of beauty it's that easy to do let's do the same thing very quickly now using a different authenticator app let's use lastpass authenticator to do it again so i have lastpass set up here and i'm going to do the exact same thing i'm going to go in and i'm going to say setup two-step verification i'm going to say use an authenticator app click set up up comes the qr code lastpass looks at the code and here is an important thing lastpass will do for us here's what lastpass does it says need backup this is something i should have paid attention to a while ago more on that in a moment lastpass can save all your accounts so you have them if you change devices or need to restore this one yes i will back up my lastpass and in this particular case it's going to back it up into lastpass so now if we go back into our authenticator app into lastpass it's doing the same thing it's asking me to enter the code here for paypal and it's going to be zero five 294.057 so we can see once again now paypal is married to my lastpass authenticator app doesn't matter which authenticator app you use just consistently use the same one for all of your accounts so that's that easy to set it up i don't see any reason that we all aren't using two-factor authentication now i mentioned a moment ago that i backed up my uh authenticator account uh my my lastpass authenticator account so that i can restore it should i change devices i hadn't thought of this before and i changed devices or i didn't know about this before and when i changed devices to this new iphone i had been using google authenticator for the longest time on my old iphone and i had not looked up the fact that when you change uh phones that you lose all of your two-factor authentication and it's very difficult to recover it all in fact i had to call customer service on a couple of the accounts such as paypal in order to reclaim my account because the authenticator remained tied to the old phone and i had already restarted the old phone and cleaned off all of the information from the old phone before i did it now so now you can i've discovered in google authenticator export your accounts which is something you should do if you're moving phones export your accounts before the phone or as in the case of lastpass authenticator have all of your accounts backed up and then also make sure and check before you migrate devices that all of your account settings pass through otherwise you're going to be spending way too much time re-establishing your connection with what are really our most important accounts bottom line two-factor authentication is not a thousand percent well that's not a real thing it's not 100 foolproof it can still be beaten occasionally but it is our best defense for protecting our privacy and our accounts from the bad guys i encourage you to set it up for yourself before we go i want to invite you to join us for one of our weekly tutorial webinars every week here at dottotech we provide a free tutorial on productivity and content creation it's called webinar wednesday it's free it's awesome and you're invited links are right here till next time i'm steve dotto have fun storming the castle [Music] you

Channel: dottotech

Views: 152,384

Keywords: How can I enable 2 factor authentication?, How does 2FA work?, multi-factor authentication, How to enable 2FA, two factor authentication, 2fa, google authenticator, 2 factor authentication, google authenticator app, lastpass authenticator, google authenticator lost phone, google authenticator tutorial, google authenticator recovery, google authenticator crypto.com, 2 factor authentication gmail, security, is 2 factor authentication hackable, what is 2 factor authentication

Id: hlpoc3C1kWM

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2022