Today, Yubico is proud to announce that we are expanding our partnership with Microsoft AccountGuard to deliver YubiKeys, free of cost, to high-profile and high-risk organizations. Last year, Yubico and Microsoft joined forces to equip political campaigns and parties with robust identity and access management (IAM) and phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA) solutions ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections. Now, we’re extending these same protections to international election campaigns, human rights defenders, healthcare workers, journalists, and other high-risk organizations in 31 countries.
This announcement comes one week after the general availability of Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) passwordless login, allowing enterprises to ditch passwords and securely access their accounts with just the tap or touch of a YubiKey. With unique multi-protocol capabilities, the YubiKey is flexible enough to authenticate across both legacy and modern systems. So, no matter where customers are in their journey to move beyond passwords, the YubiKey can deliver trust at scale. We are thrilled to make these same features available to a wider set of AccountGuard customers.
“Yubico is a valued partner for Microsoft AccountGuard and the YubiKey is our recommended hardware-based multi-factor authentication solution,” said Tom Burt, Corporate Vice President, Customer Security & Trust, Microsoft. “We’re working with individuals whose security is at risk by sophisticated attackers. Knowing that we can give AccountGuard customers the most advanced form of phishing protection, at no cost, is a tremendous win across the board.”
Protecting at-risk and vulnerable populations is essential to Yubico’s vision and mission: to make the internet safer for everyone. Free speech is an important human right, and we recognize that cyber attacks are used every day to silence voices that matter. For many years, Yubico has enjoyed a longstanding relationship with Freedom of the Press to protect and defend at-risk journalists from doxxing and other cyber threats, and as of last year, we expanded this work to include other at-risk organizations and the populations they serve.
With the launch of the Yubico for Free Speech Program, and through our partnership with Microsoft AccountGuard, Yubico has been able to support organizations like Defending Digital Campaigns (DDC) in their quest to ensure fair and secure elections. Five of the democracies Yubico and AccountGuard are now serving have upcoming elections in 2021 — The Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Estonia, and the Czech Republic — driving a greater demand for the most advanced levels of security and phishing protection.
Any AccountGuard-eligible customer can learn more about enrolling in AccountGuard or taking advantage of the tools announced today by signing up here. New and existing AccountGuard customers will have access to a limited number of YubiKeys, free of charge, depending on the size of their organization.