– Stina Ehrensvard, CEO and founder of Yubico (www.yubico.com) says:

When I get the question “who is the biggest competitor to Yubico?” my answer is “username password.” The vast majority of all Internet users rely on a static, and in most cases simple password, re-used across their Internet life.

RSA has done an honorable job of educating the market on the need for strong two-factor authentication. The company was formed by three brilliant mathematicians whose initials today have become almost synonymous with strong encryption. Organizations that once made the decision to add hardware-based authentication tokens to their login process have understood the need for it and will most likely not move to anything less secure.

In 1982, seven people in the Chicago area died after taking Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide. Industry experts concluded that Tylenol was finished as a brand. The CEO of Johnson & Johnson, maker of the analgesic, had a choice to make. He acted immediately, launched a recall of 30 million bottles of Tylenol capsules on television and developed new security standards for drug manufacturing. And in doing so, set a gold standard in crisis control.

When RSA, six months after the SecurID security breach, learned that they were losing a large U.S. ISP to Yubico, they sent their top sales executives to engage with the company. The RSA executives put in a lot of effort trying to convince the CEO of the ISP to keep RSA as their authentication vendor. But it was too late.

In 2008, when Yubico launched the YubiKey, many larger enterprises disregarded Yubico, not only for the fact that we were a new small company, with a new technology, but also because of our open source software offering. Over the past year we have seen a shift, where leading enterprises, including DoD contractors, financial services and the world’s biggest cloud companies, have moved from legacy authentication tokens to YubiKeys, appreciating the ease of use of our innovations, but also the opportunity to scrutinize and take own control of the software and token secrets.