MFA is one of the most secure ways to keep your accounts, and your data secure

Although not infallible, it vastly increases the security of the account it is active on, and improve the organisations data safety

Introduction

Everybody has online accounts, from shopping with your favourite supermarket to online banking, these accounts are now a fact of life.

It should go without saying that keeping these accounts secure is as important as locking your front door at night. However not everybody shares the same concern about online safety as others.

Why so secure?

Would you allow a stranger to read your post? If your accounts aren’t secure, there’s a potential that strangers can get confidential information from the church.

It can be frustrating having to jump through extra hoops in order to access an email inbox that you’ve been using for years, but these steps protect your information, your friends information and everybody who contacts the church.

MFA

So what is MFA? It is simply a way of a computer having multiple ways to confirm that you are who you say you are when you log in to an online service. The first way the computer will check if it is you is by you entering your username and password. Then there are multiple ways the computer can confirm who you are:

  • it can ask for your password
  • it can send a notification to your phone
  • it can send you an email for you to respond
  • it can text you a code to input into a website
  • it can even phone you up and read you a code for you to put it into a website

The important takeaway about all of these approaches is that they require some of your information in order to work. This is usually either your phone number or email address, or by having an application installed on your mobile phone

For Family Church, we have configured our MFA to require you to install the Microsoft Authenticator app on your mobile phone or alternatively, you can receive codes via SMS text message.

Conclusions

It’s important to use MFA wherever you can with online accounts. Social media, although some people may not consider it important, your account contains a lot of information about people you know. When you secure your account, you are securing your data, but more often than not you’re also protecting other peoples data.

Finally, it’s important to note that MFA is not infallible. First of all, you should never provide the code that is sent to you to anyone else under any circumstances. Secondly, online safety still should be considered when using the internet. Viruses and malware are capable of circumventing MFA and accessing your account so if you suspect your computer is infected, you should ensure it is cleaned and safe before logging in to any of your online accounts