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Dropbox Turns on 2-Step Verification for All Accounts: You Should Too
August 29th, 2012
Losing the totality of your digital life can be a mind-boggling experience, which is one of the reasons that I immediately turned on 2-step verification when Google made it available for Google/Gmail accounts. Dropbox finally followed suit and I’m expecting others like PayPal and Amazon to follow as well.
Why should you enable it? If you are using Dropbox to archive some files and your hard drive gets toasted, then it makes sense to protect them as much as possible. 2-step verification means that you add your mobile number to the site, and each time you log into your Dropbox with a new device, you’ll be sent a text message with a verification code that you’ll need to enter so that you can login.
It’s a smart idea to enable this because it’s improbable that your accounts and your mobile phone will be compromised at the same time.
[via Dropbox]
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While 2 step verification should be a requirement for all online content sites, I don’t think it will solve dropbox’s security issues. Given they have been hacked multiple times already, I don’t see any feasible reason to stay with them as a cloud user. I switched to 4sync, now I get 15gb of free storage instead of 5gb, also I get better security.
Even if it is late it’s nice to see that leading companies in their respective verticals are giving users the better balance between security and user experience by implementing 2FA which allows us to telesign into our accounts. I know some will claim this make things more complicated, but the slight inconvenience each time you log in is worth the confidence of knowing your files are secure. I’m hoping that more companies start to offer this awesome functionality. This should be a prerequisite to any system that wants to promote itself as being secure.