Top insights for IT pros
From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.
Enterprises can secure themselves by helping their employees secure their personal lives—that was the message from hardware authentication device manufacturer Yubico at CES 2025 in Las Vegas.
At the company’s booth at the consumer tech show, Yubico Chief Brand Advocate Ronnie Manning argued enterprises should encourage employees to use their work-issued hardware authentication devices to secure their personal accounts and data as well.
In fact, that’s increasingly becoming a trend as organizations realize compromised personal accounts can lead to breaches at work, Manning told IT Brew. For example, a 2023 survey by security and compliance firm Agency found 97% of executives access work accounts from personal devices, which are generally outside their organization’s control.
“If within the organization you’re teaching good security hygiene, and because there’s no shared secrets on the YubiKey itself, we do see a lot of customers who suggest to their employees to actually utilize the YubiKeys on their home accounts, as well,” Manning said.
Since employers can simply revoke work credentials and YubiKeys have such a low price point—their basic NFC key retails for $25—there’s not even much of a reason for them to ask departing employees to turn them in.
“It would probably cost more to take the keys and re-provision [them] then starting fresh with the new employees,” Manning added.
Multi-factor authentication is one of the easiest ways to protect against threats like ransomware—as are alternatives to passwords, like passkeys or other passwordless methods like FIDO2. Physical tokens are the most secure as they preclude the use of the most commonly used phishing and social engineering techniques. However, most authentication techniques introduce friction, and physical keys add one more item for employees to keep track of.
According to Manning, Yubico’s big focus over the past few years has been trying to minimize friction. He noted that earlier this year, Yubico partnered with Okta to offer physical keys with preregistered FIDO credentials.
“What we’ve been really working on over the last few years is making sure that our enterprise customers are enabled as best as possible—for that whole employee life cycle, from onboarding to the authentication that they’re doing, all the way to account recovery,” Manning said.