Carers ACT Protects Vulnerable Australians’ Health Information With YubiKeys

August 2nd 2024 - Carers ACT, a major non-profit support provider for unpaid family and friend carers in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), has deployed YubiKeys to its support workers to protect vulnerable Australians’ health information.

For over 30 years, Carers ACT has provided family and friend carers with a wide range of services to support their caring role. This includes care planning advice and support, counselling, peer support, breaks from caring, educational workshops, social activities, advocacy, mobility and technology aids.

Carers ACT operates from four locations with 65 full-time employees, with additional support workers in short-term respite facilities and a disability services program. Providing safe and effective services for family and friend carers requires timely access to sensitive health information, which is critical to delivering appropriate care but is valuable to threat actors.

“Account compromise is hugely worrying for us,” says Thomas Pike, the ICT Innovation Lead at Carers ACT. “We hold some of the most sensitive personal information you can and take our responsibility to protect that information very seriously.”

“As an organisation, and especially as an ICT department, we are very aware that we require health information to provide a safe and effective service. We spend a lot of time ensuring our systems are responsive to those particular threats,” said Thomas Pike.

Carers ACT chose to replace cumbersome passwords, complex two-factor and legacy multi-factor authentication (MFA), such as SMS codes, with FIDO-based YubiKeys to enable a secure, user-friendly password less experience for its support workers using their new Microsoft Surface Go tablets.

Thanks to the technical support information and guides provided by Yubico, the ICT team were able to implement YubiKeys quickly.

“I cannot say enough about the ease of implementation. We were able to implement the YubiKeys within just a couple of days. The YubiKey has simplified the login process for our staff, allowing them to continue to focus on providing quality care,” said Thomas Pike, ICT Innovation Lead, Carers ACT.

“The fact that all of our support workers will be using strong MFA-based authentication was a real plus for us in selecting YubiKeys” said Karyn Ferraris, Chief Operating Officer at Carers ACT.

Geoff Schomburgk, Asia Pacific Vice President at Yubico, said: “We are thrilled that Carers ACT has selected YubiKeys to make the login process for its support workers simple, secure and phishing-resistant,” said Geoff Schomburgk.

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