Activate MFA on the Root Account

Learn how tos secure the root account by enabling MFA.

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Keeping our account safe

The root account has massive importance. It has all privileges, including billing, so even if you create an IAM user and give them full administrative privileges to your account, there are still a few privileges that they don’t get. Since the root account has everything, it is an extremely important account, and it’s the one that you really need to secure.

When we talk about multi-factor authentication, we’re talking about using more than one type of tool for authentication. Those different types of authentication can be something you know, like a username and password, something you have, which is a physical device of some sort or something that generates a code, and then there’s something that you are, which means biometrics, for instance, retina scans or fingerprints. In the case of AWS, we’re going to use two factors of authentication. One of them will be something that we know, which is our username and password. The other will be something that we have, and that’s going to be a multifactor authentication device.

In this lesson, we will activate MFA on the root account.

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