Case Study: Large Colleges and Universities achieve phishing‑resistant passwordless MFA and improved student and faculty experience with Secret Double Octopus

Passwordless MFA Helps University Bolster Security with a Better Student and Faculty Experience

Large Colleges and University, a 100+-year-old state university with roughly 7,000 users, struggled with phishing and MFA failures after relying on long passwords and SMS/email one‑time passcodes. Facing understaffed IT, high device turnover among students, and the need to preserve faculty academic freedom, the institution evaluated passwordless options and ran a proof-of-concept with Secret Double Octopus’s passwordless MFA (Octopus Platform) to find a phishing-resistant, user-friendly solution.

Secret Double Octopus implemented its passwordless MFA to remove passwords from local and remote logins, enable push notifications and biometric verification across devices, and avoid hardware tokens. The deployment protected about 7,000 users, stopped the phishing vectors that had caused the prior breach, streamlined matriculation and device management, and supported compliance needs such as NIST 800-171 — all delivered with an easy-to-manage rollout for a limited IT staff.