The article notes that many organisations don't offer 2FA. Even dismissing the issues of most 2FA mechanisms -- reliance on mobile or landline acount integrity is exceptionally poor thinking these days, similarly email providers[0] -- the option often simply is not available.

A particularly pathological case is banking and financial institutions. After helping an elderly, cognitively-impaired, and frankly combative and denial-tending relative[1] with OS and browser upgrades, including restoring a whole host of privacy and security tools and extensions,[2] we then had to walk through numerous bill-pay and financial sites.

One large brokerage firm actually did offer a Google-esque voice-based numeric one-time-code callbacks, to a voice line, and I give them kudos for this. It's not perfect, but ot exceeds industry norms by a huge factor. The bank, a large national institution, does not, and it took a half-dozen or more rephrasings of the question "do you offer two-factor authentication" to even get a clear "no". I was told, a week ago, that someone would call to follow up.

No one has.

Brian Krebs has an excellent, if depressing, 2018 exploration of banking security, "What Is Your Bank’s Security Banking On?".[3] Sadly, the industry is dominated by a small handful of banking platform providers. Four, Fiserv, Jack Henry, FIS, and CSI, serv over 80% of the market. Bank regulators, responding to Krebs, said that "small to mid-sized banks are massively beholden to their platform providers, and many banks simply accept the defaults instead of pushing for stronger alternatives."

This is not a good situation.

Digging further into the matter, I turned up a set of publications by Experian -- the credit rating agency which hasn't been breached ... yet -- on risk and fraud, including credential compromise.[4] One of these mentions in. passing that the typical person has "about 100" service-based accounts.[5] That's not all that far off the count of 700 accounts HN users have reported having.[6]

The very notion of account-based services is rapidly becoming untenable, even absent password security.

I mean, yes, let's make passwords obsolete (I'm a fan of very-near-field token devices, such as NFCRing[7]). But centralising services, especially data services, only makes thing worse from an all-the-eggs-in-one-basket perspective. So more importantly, let's kill accounts in favour of both stateless interactions, and reasonablly self-hosted-and-managed -- and yes, that means self-hostable and self-manageable, including by elderly and impaired people -- systems.

That's a high bar, and flies in the face of the past 15 years' surveillance-capitalism business models. But accounting and risk rules changes recognising that data are in fact liability might help get us there.

________________________________

Notes:

0. See Matthew Miller's SIM swap horror story, https://www.zdnet.com/article/sim-swap-horror-story-ive-lost... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20203482

1. Seeing up close not only the general bewilderment and lack of faculty of ordinary citizens in dealing with technology, but the declines imposed by age and illness, as well as the personal and psychological difficulties of fraught interpersonal and family relationships (also affected by age and illness, both physical and mental), is sobering. This is a large submarine risk brewing.

2. OpenWRT's AdBlock on the router (https://openwrt.org/packages/pkgdata/adblock), as we'll as OpenWRT's basic firewalling, OSX 10.14, Firefox, latest updates. Extensions are uBlock Origin, uMatrix (which I must specifically tune for specific sites -- it's powerful but fiddly), Self-Destructing Cookies (also requiring per-site configuration), Privacy Badger, and Ghostery.

3. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/03/what-is-your-banks-secur... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534820)

4. Stealthily hidden around Experian's website, though this search presently lists several of the beter ones: https://www.experian.com/innovation/thought-leadership/fraud... (https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.experian.com/innov...)

5. "Upcoming fraud trends and how to combat them: Ebook" https://www.experian.com/innovation/thought-leadership/upcom...

6. packet_nerd reports that here, though I recall an earlier mention as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488899

7. See https://nfcring.com. For numerous reasons, a non-insertion-based, replaceable, repudiable, physical token strikes me as among the best possible options. YubiKey is a close approximation, but not quite there yet.