Square Enix Adds Authenticators to Final Fantasy XI

Square Enix is taking a note from Blizzard and now adding something that most online applications should have to protect from hacking. Authenticators are being released for some undisclosed amount to gamers which makes it a lot more secure due to the fact that security tokens are used for strictly two-factor authentication.

What’s interesting about this is that many corporate networks use two factor authentication. But when it comes to online banks? There are some talk about how Bank of America was going to try and do this, but I have no clue where that went. Probably someone “cut costs” and decided that two-factor isn’t worthwhile. PayPal also happens to use this for their Merchant accounts and personal.

In my opinion, having been in the security world for a number of years, I have to say that this move is actually pretty brilliant and beating out your normal financial world in the online spectrum says a lot about both the progressiveness of the gaming industry and the conservativeness of the banking world. While this isn’t the end-all-be-all secure solution, allowing hackers only sixty seconds to actually crack a code does throw a slight wrench into the works and ups the challenge of trying to break the algorithm by other means than brute force. Very neat of Square Enix to follow in the footsteps of Blizzard in this sense and hope to see other MMORPG publishers follow down this path in the future.