A friend called my old password setup 'a joke waiting to happen' back in 2018.

I was using the same base word with just a number change for everything, like 'Seattle123' for my bank and 'Seattle456' for email. They showed me how a breach on one site could let someone guess all my others in minutes, so I finally got a password manager and made totally different, long codes for each account. What's the one tip that finally got you to change a bad security habit you had for years?

3 comments

3 Comments

skyler_kim153mo ago

Honestly, that setup gets a bad rap. For most people, the chance of a targeted attack is super low. If your base word isn't something obvious like 'password' or your name, and you're not a celebrity, who's actually going to try 'Seattle123' then 'Seattle456' on every site? Most breaches are bots trying reused lists. Adding that number change probably already put you ahead of like half the people using 'password123' on everything. A password manager is a single point of failure anyway. What if you lose access to it? Then you're locked out of everything at once.

umab353mo ago

But what about when that one site gets hacked?

stone.thomas1mo ago

Yeah, about that "what if you lose access to it" thing. A buddy of mine used a password manager for years, then his phone broke and he locked himself out of the email he used to recover it. He spent three weeks trying to get back into his bank account, his Netflix, all that stuff. Ended up having to call customer service for each site and prove who he was. He told me he'd rather just use a system like yours and remember a few different passwords than risk being totally locked out again.