How to set up two-factor authentication on your Call of Duty account

Black Ops Cold War is right around the corner, meaning there’s a brand new game that you’ll be connecting with your Call of Duty Account. Here’s how you can protect it from hackers by enabling two-factor authentication.

Black Ops Cold War, the latest game in the Call of Duty franchise, is almost here. Like every other CoD game, if you want to jump into the multiplayer/online modes, you’ll have to either create an account or sign-in to one before you can do so.

This account saves almost all of your online stats like your K/D, your battle pass progress, and more, so getting it hacked is not an ideal situation. Luckily, there’s a way to mitigate this problem: two-step authentication.

What does two-step authentication do?

Like with every other account in existence that uses this feature, two-step authentication gives people another barrier that they have to pass when attempting to sign-in to their account.

After you sign-in once, your account will ping some type of third-party service (either a phone number or an app) and request that you authenticate the sign-in.

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This helps ensure that nobody but yourself can sign-in to your account and is one of the most successful way to stop hackers from stealing your data or, in this case, accessing your CoD stats.

How do I set up two-step authentication?

Setting up two-factor authentication is easy and will only take a few minutes of your time. The benefits of it are substantial and everyone should do it if they can.

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Before you do this, it is worth noting that if you set up two-factor authentication, you won’t be able to sign-in to the Call of Duty Companion App. According to Activision, this is a bug that the publisher is working to fix so it hopefully won’t be a problem for two long. That being said, it’s still worth noting.

1. Go to profile.callofduty.com/cod/announcement2FA on your computer or mobile device.
2. Click the button that says “Set up two factor authentication”.
3. Download the Google authenticator app on your mobile device.
4. Hit the “+” sign once in the app, then either scan your QR code that appears on the site or input the manual code at the bottom of the page.

As previously implied, if you love using the CoD Companion App, you may want to hold off on using 2FA until the devs can work out a fix for the sign-in issue. That being said, the benefits of this feature far outweigh any negatives. Still, the choice is obviously yours at the end of the day.