You’ve Secured the Top Floor. What About Everyone Else?

Most enterprises issue YubiKeys to 15 to 30 percent of their workforce: executives, engineers, finance, IT admins, the people with the most obvious access to sensitive systems. The remaining 70 to 85 percent, customer support, operations, sales, field teams, log in with weaker methods, even though they still touch wire transfers, customer data, and vendor systems (Verizon DBIR, enterprise survey data).

That gap isn’t a rounding error. It’s a map, and attackers read it.

The coverage gap is a target list

If 20 percent of a company carries a hardware token and 80 percent doesn’t, an attacker doesn’t need to break the YubiKey. They just need to find someone outside it. Three ways that plays out in practice:

Lateral movement. An attacker compromises a weakly authenticated ops employee, then pivots through internal systems to reach the accounts that do have a YubiKey.

Business email compromise. Finance, customer success, and operations staff handle wire transfers, contracts, and customer records, all valuable targets, usually without hardware-backed authentication.

Supply chain impersonation. Attackers impersonate a vendor-connected employee, often in sales or procurement, who never got a token, to get further into the environment than a direct attack on a protected account would allow.

Even YubiKey users have a backdoor

Coverage gaps aren’t the only weak point. Every hardware token deployment has a fallback path for when someone loses their key, and that fallback is almost always weaker than the token itself.

The typical sequence looks like this: an attacker tries the YubiKey login and gets blocked, since YubiKey authentication itself is genuinely strong. They then trigger an “I lost my key” scenario, which routes to a helpdesk fallback, usually SMS OTP, an email link, or a supervisor override. From there, a SIM swap or an email phish takes over that fallback channel in minutes using widely available attack toolkits. The YubiKey never gets touched. It gets walked around.

A hardware token is only as strong as the fallback path someone uses when they don’t have it.

Closing both gaps without replacing what you already have

Unibeam works two ways alongside an existing YubiKey deployment, and neither requires ripping anything out.

Coverage expansion extends hardware-grade authentication to the employees who don’t have a YubiKey and may never get one. The credential is anchored in the SIM, not a separate device, so there’s nothing new to issue, distribute, or replace when someone loses it. Provisioning is instant through eSIM, which matters for field workers, ops, and customer success roles where a physical token rollout was never going to be practical. (For how a SIM-anchored credential differs from SMS OTP, and why a SIM swap doesn’t defeat it, see SIM-Anchored Authentication vs. SMS OTP.)

Fallback hardening replaces the weak “I lost my key” path for employees who do have a YubiKey. Instead of falling back to SMS OTP or an email link, “forgot my YubiKey” triggers a hardware-verified SIM check. An attacker who successfully manipulates the helpdesk still hits a second hardware-grade wall.

What this costs, compared to the alternative

Rolling YubiKeys out to an entire workforce is expensive well past the sticker price. At $50 to $80 per device, a 10,000-person company is looking at $500,000 to $800,000 before logistics, replacements, and the helpdesk load of managing lost keys. Extending coverage through Unibeam avoids that math entirely: no hardware to procure or distribute, no shelf stock, and usage-based pricing instead of a per-device cost.

Deployment is also fast because it sits alongside an existing identity provider rather than replacing it. Most organizations activate Unibeam org-wide in under a day, and it typically runs at a 99.1 percent authentication success rate in production across banking, healthcare, and government environments.

What YubiKey shops usually ask

“We already invested heavily in YubiKeys. Why add another layer?”

Unibeam doesn’t replace that investment. It extends the same hardware-grade standard to the 70 to 85 percent of employees your YubiKeys don’t reach, and closes the fallback loophole for the employees who already have one.

“Can’t we just roll YubiKeys out to everyone?”

At $50 to $80 per device, that’s $500,000 to $800,000 for a 10,000-person company before logistics, replacements, and IT overhead. Extending coverage through the SIM employees already carry costs a fraction of that.

“How does this compare to FIDO2 passkeys as a fallback?”

Passkeys are strong, but they require device enrollment and app-side configuration. A SIM-anchored credential works even if the device is new, wiped, or replaced, because the credential lives in the SIM rather than the device.

“What if an employee’s SIM gets swapped?”

SIM swap attacks target SMS OTP, which operates at the application layer. A SIM-anchored credential is a cryptographic key stored in the SIM’s secure element, and swapping the phone number doesn’t move that key. See SIM-Anchored Authentication vs. SMS OTP for the full explanation.

There’s also a renewal-season angle worth knowing about: a partial YubiKey rollout is exactly the kind of coverage gap that shows up in a 2026 cyber insurance questionnaire.

Run a 30-day coverage audit

See exactly where your authentication coverage has gaps, at no cost. The process runs in four steps: map your current YubiKey deployment to see which employees are covered and which are on a weaker fallback; try non-YubiKey employees on Unibeam via a free secondary eSIM, with no app install; replace the fallback path for existing YubiKey users; and after 30 days, get a full audit report showing authentication strength across every employee tier.

Ready to close the gap? Reach out at [email protected] or visit unibeam.com.

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