How to secure yourself with 2FA authentication and how to reset google authenticator on a new phone?
Now that our whole life is on google authenticator, we all remember that first moment when we asked ourselves:
"Eumh... but what happens when I lose my phone?"
Unfortunately for me I never asked this to myself until I lost my phone in a bus right in the middle of nowhere on my way to a beautiful island, Ilha das couves in Brazil.
As I was laying in this paradise all I could think about was hackers taking all my crypto and I can fairly say that i didn't enjoy it as much as I could have.
Of course nobody hacked me (the people around this island don't even know what bitcoin is) and i stressed for nothing. As soon As i got home I contacted all the exchanges asking them to reset my google 2fa. I had to proof to every exchange in different ways that it was me by sending in pictures with notes, looking up ip addresses etc etc.
If I just had done it the right way I could even recover my google auth right there on the beach with my girlfriends phone.
So how to reset your google auth the right way?
There are three ways to reset your google auth:
- Contact the exchange / company to manually reset it
- Make a backup of your private key for every platform/ exchange
- Make a backup of you google auth itself
The first one is simple but a lot of work, contact support and answer lots of complicated questions.
The second one works well if you only use your google authenticator on one exchange. With a backup of the QR code you can reset the google authenticator on a new phone. If you have a lot of different exchanges however this is not so easy.
The third and easiest way is to make a backup on google authenticator itself.
-> Go to Google authenticator & logg in.
-> Set up google authenticator if you haven't done this yet. Also activate it for logging into your google account.
Why? Because from This page you can reset your google authenticator device. So if you can log into your google account and reset your google authenticator, without having to use google authenticator, all hackers need is your google password and your exchange password (which might even be the same? if this is the case, make sure they are different) and bye bye crypto's.
-> Click on "backup nodes" and generate 10 new codes.
-> Safe them on a place where you believe hackers can't reach them.
-> Now when you lost your phone, use the backup codes to log into your google authenticator and change your device.
Now all your exchanges are available with the google authenticator on your new device.
If you thought this was useful please give it a vote up or even share it with other people so nobody has to go through the same hassle and stress as i did. If you have anything to add to this or have any feedback, please let me know in the comments ;)
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Thanks for this, I suddenly had this same realisation, I use Authy and it's a similar process - link here: https://authy.com/features/backup/
Cheers
Very helpful post. We all need to learn about staying secure in the crypto space.
This guy.... ;) keep up the good work
Dank je wel!
So, I understand that this will help you recover google access, but it will do nothing to help you with access to third part applications using authenticator. Those rely on unique keys that exist only on your phone and on their servers. Google does not store online backup of your third part 2fa keys. The only way to recover these is to backup the original keys/qr or backup your authenticator data. I understand that rquires root privileges and so is not recommended. Easiest is to use a qr scanner to scan and save all 2fa keys when you are setting up. Save these offline in a secure place. I think authy has easier backup options but Ive never tried it.
So, if you recover you google authenticator on a new device you can't access the same accounts as your old phone? You can only recover those with the backup of the qr code? Have you tried this out? If this is true you should indeed back up a QR code for every exchange and also have a backup for your google access.
Great piece of knowledge. Cheers.
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STOPBTW, I use FreeOTP as 2fa for some sites. It is possible to install it on Android phone without Google account at all from F-Droid