Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon and then CEO of Web Services at Amazon.com Inc., speaks during the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in San Francisco, California, USA, on Wednesday 19 April 2017.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon’s web services cloud unit will offer some customers free USB sticks to help them log in securely to their accounts starting in October, following Wednesday’s turnout at the summit. White House cybersecurity, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
The initiative demonstrates increased corporate confidence in physical hardware designed to prevent attempted fraudulent access to accounts. These events can have financial consequences, such as allowing ransomware attacks that attempt to extort money from organizations.
Many of the major online services, including Airbnb and Netflix, depend on AWS’s computing and data storage infrastructure provided from data centers around the world and, if attackers could access, the availability of these services. could be at risk.
AWS wants to make these incidents less likely.
A White House data sheet released Wednesday said Amazon “announced that it will make a multifactor authentication device available to all Amazon Web Services account holders at no additional cost.” But just because people have AWS accounts doesn’t mean they automatically receive free keys, which typically cost $ 25 or more.
Customers will be able to request USB sticks from Amazon’s website starting in October, an Amazon spokesman told CNBC on Thursday. The keys will be available to root account owners for U.S.-based customers who spend more than $ 100 each month. but people with individual identity and access management accounts, or IAMs, are not eligible. A single AWS account can have 1,000 or more IAM users.
In the case of AWS, the account holder can connect a key to the USB port of a PC and tap it after typing an email address and password to open the AWS admin console. . AWS supports Gemalto keys owned by Thales and SurePassID and Yubico.
Kevin Raineri, vice president of business development for SurePassID, said the company is not involved in the Amazon deal. He said he would guess it was Yubico. The AWS spokesman declined to specify which companies will produce the keys and Yubico declined to comment. A Gemalto spokesman did not respond to any requests for comment.
People will be able to use the keys issued by AWS to sign in to other online services, including Dropbox, Google’s Gmail, and Microsoft’s GitHub, Amazon said in a statement.
For years, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, as well as AWS, have allowed people to buy USB security keys and add them to accounts as an additional means to confirm their identity.
In US politics, cybersecurity has also become a higher priority. Campaign workers relied on security keys during the 2020 presidential election, and in May, President Joe Biden signed an executive order requiring U.S. government agencies to allow multifactor authentication.
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