Google revealed today that a recent initiative to require customers to enable 2-Step Verification (2SV) has been incredibly successful: among the over 150 million customers who were auto-enrolled into 2SV since last year, account compromises fell by 50 percent.

“By making all of our products secure by default, we keep more users safe than anyone else in the world, blocking malware, phishing attempts, spam messages, and cyber-attacks,” Google director Guemmy Kim explains. “Last year, we accelerated our journey to eliminating password threats by starting to auto-enroll users in 2-Step Verification (2SV), giving people an extra layer of protection when cybercriminals try to hack into their accounts, by requiring a second form of verification beyond the password.”

Google says that this decrease speaks volumes about the effectiveness of 2SV and similar multi-factor authentication schemes. (Microsoft’s calls its consumer effort “two-step authentication.”) But it wants to do more. It provides a Security Checkup for Google account holders to help make sure those accounts are as securely configured as possible. It will continue auto-enrolling users into 2SV. And it provides a Password Manager that’s built into Chrome, Android, and the Google App; this Password Manager helps create strong passwords for online accounts, check if they’ve been involved in a breach, verifies the authenticity of sign-in pages before logging you in.

You can learn more at the Google Safety Center.

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