In March, ETrade Financial Corp. became the first major financial services company in the country to launch a two-factor authentication service to protect customers from online fraud and identity theft. Nearly eight months later, the service, which is based on RSA Security Inc.'s SecurID token technology, is proving to be very successful, said ETrade CIO Greg Framke in this interview with Computerworld.

Excerpt:
What was the main driver of this whole initiative?
I would say that since our whole business is online and ETrade.com is our storefront, we have always been very sensitive to our customer requirements. In the older days, companies focused a lot of their time and energy around protecting themselves from people who wanted to hack into the company or launch denial-of-service attacks. While these things certainly haven't gone away, ETrade got the sense early on that there was a trend that [hackers] were starting to go after the weakest link in the chain, which was the customer. We were pretty early on thinking about the things that we could do to help protect our customers, like determining potentially suspicious or fraudulent activity and requiring authentication codes for outbound wires and [automated clearinghouses]. So we've been employing a number of techniques to help protect our customers. Multifactor authentication is kind of like the padlock on the door.Source: ComputerWorldPrashanth RaiTag(s):Security