Yubico making the online world safer with full-proof authentication

Today, phishing remains as the biggest or the root cause of the maximum data breaches taking across the globe. The creator and the contributor to the FIDO standard, Yubico helps secure global enterprises, SMBs, and individuals with modern phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA). With its YubiKey device, Yubico elevates cyber-resilience of its customers with modern authentication that stops phishing attacks and account takeovers before they start.

Geoff Schomburgk, Regional Vice President, Asia Pacific & Japan – Yubico shares with VARINDIA more about the company and what it does to stop phishing attacks and prevent account takeovers - 

Why Yubico?
What Yubico does is to provide multi factor authentication (MFA). As many people know that the biggest cause or the root cause of data breaches is phishing, where people's credentials are compromised or stolen, and they end up on the dark web and places like that. So, if we can stop phishing, that will stop 80% of data breaches. 

What are the problem statements you address? 
There is an increasing number of cyber-crimes across the globe. Data breach is a global challenge. No one is immune from cybercrime today; we see every day in the news incidents of cyber breaches happening in Australia, the US and France, and now more commonly it is taking place in Asia as well. The problem statement that we address is to prevent phishing. Yubico wants to make the online world a safer place for people and we can do that by preventing data breaches to happen through phishing.  

How is your organization working towards addressing phishing activities? 
Proactively Yubico was the initial inventor of a phishing resistant authentication method, FIDO (Fast Identity Online). Yubico first created the first FIDO standard with Google back in 2011-12. The vision was to take strong public key crypto to the mass market. And as a result of that, we brought the industry along on this journey with us. We brought in Microsoft, Apple, and many other players in the tech space to develop an even better version of phishing resistant authentication. We brought in three concepts around making it secure and phishing resistant, easy to use and available at a global scale. Today, the technical specifications are hosted by the open-authentication industry consortium known as the FIDO Alliance. This FIDO alliance that Yubico pioneered is now a global standard in authentication.

What is your global presence?

Yubico now is a publicly listed company on the Swedish Stock Exchange and you can find us at yubico.st. We have some 450 people scattered worldwide. We operate in all countries around the world and are able to get YubiKey into the hands of citizens, businesses, corporations and governments anywhere around the world. 

What is your GTM strategy? 
The Go-To-Market strategy of the Asia Pacific region for which I am responsible is through business partners. So we have the channel approach where we work with distributors in India, and have preferred long term business partners like iValue. In other markets, we have a distribution partner as well. We then use dedicated certified resellers to take that product to the market.

Why did you decide to partner with iValue? 
The unique selling proposition for iValue is that they know their customers well. And like their name says – I Value, they add value in what they do added value. For us, they are able to bring the YubiKey to the market and make it easy to get YubiKey to their customers.