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K. V. Kurmanath

Hyderabad, Dec. 8 If you don’t feel secure with one password, better to have another in order to keep off the gate-crashers into your mail accounts and online transactions.

“With hackers and mischief mongers breaking into mail accounts and sniffing transaction details, it is better to have the second password, or the Second Factor, to thwart their attacks,” Dr Shekhar Kirani, Vice-President of Verisign Services India Private Limited, told Business Line.

Dr Kirani was here to take part in the two-day data security conference organised by theb National Association of Software and Services Companies last week.

Verisign, a global leader in providing secure online solutions, is in the process of bringing a credit-card sized Second Factor tokens into the Indian market.

Each time a user presses a thumb-sized mark on the card, he or she would get a six-digit number that acts as a second password. “The card can produce n-number of such passwords, exclusive to the user whose identity would be known to the bank’s transaction mechanism via the Verisign database,” he said.

At present, the company is talking to various banks and financial institutes to introduce the card. “As the usage increases, the same card could be used to generate multiple Second Factor passwords for different banks,” he said.

“We are in talks with 150 banks, small and big, in India. Talks with 30 are in advanced stage,” he said.

The uniqueness about the technology is that the password generated would last for just 30 seconds.

“This will thwart remote access to passwords of bank accounts and other e-commerce sites. If hackers sitting in remote areas still want to break into your accounts, they need to physically steal the token cards that contain the other password. This, in fact, reduces the probability of hacking,” he said.

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