In the News- E-Security- Phone Verification
Good news, fellow techies! The day of the CAPTCHA may be gone (thunderous applause)! A new identity verification method has been making the rounds on web land, and it’s got a lot of names: telephone verification, two factor authentication, automated PIN service, and so on. But whatever you call it, it’s all the same thing, and it looks like the best method the Internet’s seen yet to stop Fraudsters.
So what is this thing? You’ve probably already used it, but if not, here’s the run down.
Phone Based Identity Verification is a new e-security method based on shoppers entering a cell phone number to validate their identities. When they put in their cell number, an automated service sends them a voice message or an SMS text (the user can choose their preferred option when entering their number) with a unique one-off PIN number. The user then puts this PIN number into the verification field, and the deal is done. Assuming they’ve got the correct PIN, their identity is verified.
This method looks like it’s stopping spammers, false IPs, and even denial of service floods. Google’s already using it. So is Craigslist. Can the rest of the Internet be far behind?
It’s been awhile since programmers and hackers figured out how to design systems to read CAPTCHAs, so this new e-security method looks like it could be more than the flavor of the month. I’m guessing that for serious e-commerce, this will become the new standard for “are you a bot” checkpoints. It’s virtually hacker proof, and I for one am hoping that it gets picked up by all email address hosts so that we can say goodbye to SPAM email floods once and for all. Everyone knows that a flagged account means very little when ten thousand email addresses can be generated in ten minutes. But ten thousand phone numbers, and programs rigged to decipher incoming text messages? I don’t think so.
The Internet can take a long time to figure out what would be obvious face to face. I’ve never seen 50,000 robots walk into a store with 50,000 randomly generated credit card numbers, and if they ever did, I doubt that the cashier would be fooled. But it happens on the Internet every day. Now, about a quarter of a century into Internet as popular culture, it looks like we’ve finally found the solution to the e-security face recognition gap.
You savvy webmasters can look into it here: Telephone Verification. There are a few different options out there for telephone and PIN identification, and you might need to shop around for the best one for your business, but TeleSign looks like it’s coming out strong as an easy and full-featured pioneer. Obviously, Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, and PayPal have already developed their own, but TeleSign is a great option for a Telephone Verification provider that can be easily integrated into existing websites.
So what’s next for e-security? Is anyone else still waiting for the retinal scanner to catch on?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR-
Keith Gambill is a freelance writer specializing in new Internet developments. He has been an accomplished programmer and self-described “tech junky” for twenty-five years. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts with “a Mac, a PC, and a golden retriever.”
This is her first article about telephone verification.
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