Clavister AB, a leading provider of IP-based security and Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions, today announced an addition to their Clavister Security Services Platform (SSP™) - the Clavister SMS One-Time Password Service. This new service from Clavister will help organizations to fight cyber fraud in a cost-effective and secure way.

Cyber fraud is an increasing problem and a serious threat to enterprises, and especially the retail banking industry. There are numerous stories of retail banking customers losing money or having their account information exposed. By providing an extra level of password protection, a new and highly secure level of protection is added which is not possible with traditional static passwords only.

The new Clavister SMS One-Time Password Service from Clavister is based on Multi-Factor Authentication technology, the same technology used by many banks and financial organization. Early adopters of MFA used so called hard-token devices to generate one-time passwords, but cost-prohibiting distribution and maintenance have led them to search for alternatives. The Clavister SMS One-Time Password Service is instead based on SMS/text messages, which are delivered to standard mobile phones, something most, if not all, users already have.

"We are very excited to offer this new service. This will give organizations all over the world the ability to increase their security in a very cost effective manner. By utilizing mobile phones and SMS/text messages we're able to achieve the same level of security as the hard-token device vendor's offer but at a much lower cost since there is no need to invest in hundreds or even thousands of hard-token devices. This also helps lowering administration costs related to managing the distribution and logistics when hard-token devices are lost or broken," said Andreas Åsander, Vice President Product Management at Clavister.

One-time passwords, sometimes referred to as 'soft-tokens', is the latest tool for organizations to fight cyber fraud. Rather than relying on traditional static passwords, one-time passwords generate a new password for the user for each authentication. The one-time password is generated by the Clavister Secure Access Gateway and distributed by Clavister Service Provisioning Network (CSPN) to the user's mobile phone as an SMS/text messages. The one-time password expires once it has been used or its scheduled life-cycle has expired.

The Clavister SMS One-Time Password Service offers a number of advantages over standard SMS/text messages delivery. Clavister can offer connectivity to more than 200 operators around the world and 99.5% of all SMS/text messages are delivered within seconds. Since one-time passwords are time-restricted, a timely delivery is of the essence. This service comes pre-installed in all Clavister Secure Access Gateways which means that the time to get started using Multi-Factor Authentication in minutes, rather than hundreds of hours of planning and administration.

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