- Seriously, I stopped using Google authenticator
and I think you should too.
Here's why.
(ambient music)
By this point, you already know
that 2-factor authentication is the best way
for the average person to secure their online accounts.
For the past few years, Google has positioned itself
as the standard for this kind of security authentication
and up until recently, I've been a faithful user
of the Google Authenticator app, but no more.
I am seriously fed up.
The Google app has now been deleted from my phone.
Sorry. That's not entirely true.
I've kept it on my phone while I'm doing this video
but once this video goes live
the app will be deleted forever from my devices.
What's absolutely crazy is mind boggling
is that the reason I'm deleting Google Authenticator
is because it's not secure.
It's a security app that's unbelievably insecure.
There are two important reasons for this,
first Google Authenticator does not allow you
to lock the app.
Let's take your banking app as an example.
If somebody has access to your phone
that doesn't mean they can automatically log on
to your bank account,
they still need your password in order to do so.
But that's not the case with Google Authenticator.
Anybody who has access to your phone
or is able to hack their way into that
first six digit passcode
is gonna have full access to all of your 2FA keys
without any additional passcode to get into that app.
And that is not a secure way to do it.
Secondly, and probably equally importantly
Google Authenticator does not allow for any kind of backup
of all of these security codes.
That means that if you lose your device
or if it gets stolen,
or if you just lose access to Google Authenticator
while you're switching phones and something like that
you've just lost access to all of your online accounts.
Now, unless you've kept all of your backup codes
when you first set up your 2FA accounts
which, let's be honest,
a lot of us haven't done that very well,
Google has no backup of this file
that you can now upload and reuse
and so it is very, very dangerous.
It's putting all of your eggs in one basket.
So what are the alternatives?
Well, there are three primary alternatives that I recommend.
There's plenty more out there
but these are the three that I really like.
And I'm gonna share them with you one by one here.
(zapping)
You'll notice as I open the Authy app
that I have to enter a pin code
in order to get access to my 2FA keys.
And this is an important security feature
that you'll find with Authy with Microsoft Authenticator
and even with 1Password,
the three apps that I'm gonna share with you right now.
And that means that even if somebody has access
to your phone and it's unlocked,
that doesn't mean they're automatically
gonna have access to your 2FA keys
and that's something that Google Authenticator
doesn't have and it should.
And once I get in here,
Authy and others have multi-device support,
which means that you can have this downloaded
and all your 2FA keys synced between different devices,
including your desktop.
So I've downloaded the desktop app for Authy
and here you can see that I've already synced
all of the different 2FA tokens.
And now, instead of having to pull out my phone
whenever I need to get a 2FA key
and I'm on my laptop or my desktop,
I can open up the app here instead.
And that's a convenience factor.
Maybe it's not quite as secure
to have that syncing happening between devices
so that's entirely up to you,
whether you want to you can turn off
multi-device support if you'd like.
On Authy, that happens within the security settings
but I do like that you can sync up
and it's an encrypted file
and that way, if you do have your phone lost or stolen
you can now download that synced file
and you still have all your 2FA keys.
You don't have to go through that recovery process.
The app is passcode protected,
and it's just a beautiful design.
I like how they use the logos
of all the different logins that I'm gonna use
instead of having to scroll through in Google Authenticator
like you saw earlier.
(zapping)
If I'm opening up Microsoft Authenticator,
it's pretty much the exact same thing
where I can use my face ID,
Authy's the same way you can use any type of biometric data
that your device allows for in order to unlock
the app itself
and then you can look in, get your codes,
copy those codes if you want.
Within the Microsoft Authenticator
if you go into the settings here you'll find that
they do allow for iCloud Backup.
So perhaps you don't want to use Authy's backup.
Maybe you don't trust them for some reason
and I completely understand,
well, you can use the iCloud Backup
on Microsoft Authenticator
to make sure that you are backing up an encrypted file
of all your 2FA keys to your iCloud account.
So it's not going to Microsoft, it's not going to Authy
it's your iCloud account.
Now, Microsoft Authenticator, in order to use that feature
in order to use the auto-fill feature or anything like that
you have to actually create
or you have to have a Microsoft account.
That's a little annoying to me.
It's not that big of a deal you can just create an account
for Microsoft through the app,
and then use that to take advantage
of the different features.
That's something that Authy doesn't require.
However, Authy does require that you use your phone number
to register your device.
And so there's, again
a little bit of that security feature there
where you're getting your phone number attached
to your 2FA keys,
and yeah, it's kinda up to you how you wanna deal with that.
(zapping)
The final one that I like
and the one that I use most often is 1Password.
Now this isn't a pay.
This is the only one of the three that I'm sharing with you
that is a paid premium option but I already use 1Password
for my passwords, for creating passwords, storing passwords
and auto-filling them on all of my devices.
So this is just an added bonus
where I can scan in any of the 2FA codes
and now it's part of my password encrypted vault.
Now, of course, again,
there are security risks involved in that
because I'm putting all my eggs in one basket.
There are some people that would prefer to do
their passwords with one
and their 2FA codes with another app.
But I don't mind doing it with my password manager 1Password
because they do just make it very simple.
They actually copy and paste.
And when I'm using my desktop,
you can notice that they automatically fill in
that one-time code if it's one of my logins
that asks for the one-time code for 2FA,
and that's again, really convenient.
I like that it gets synced between
all of my different devices and it makes it really easy.
So Authy, Microsoft Authenticator and 1Password
are excellent alternatives to Google Authenticator
that are much more secure.
They're much easier to use
and frankly they're much more beautifully designed apps
in the end.
So that's what I recommend.
Go ahead and start making that switch
because the last thing you want is to get caught
with your Google Authenticator app
and your phone being stolen or lost
or somehow losing that data because it's not synced up
and you don't have an easy way to recover any of those codes
and that is a terrible position to be in.
I definitely don't wanna find you there.
If this video has been helpful, give it a thumbs up.
Thank you for watching.
If you have questions,
I try to answer all of those in the comments below
and as always subscribe to this
All Things Secured YouTube channel
for more great tips and tricks
related to your online security.