Talked to a guy at a car meet who made me rethink my password manager

I was at a local car meet last weekend here in Austin and this guy who restores old Mustangs starts talking about how he got hacked last year. Lost access to his email, his cloud storage, everything because he used the same password for 15 years. He said he finally switched to a password manager but he's still scared to trust it. It hit me different because I've been using one for months but never actually checked if my master password was strong enough. I just assumed it was fine. Anyone else ever realize their "secure" setup had a huge blind spot?

2 comments

2 Comments

parker_park812d ago

Honestly I feel like password managers are just putting all your eggs in one basket with extra steps lol. Yeah sure you get hacked because you used the same password everywhere but now you're trusting some random company or open source app with literally every single key to your digital life. One breach on their end and you're cooked way worse than before. I've been using a simple system for years where I just have a base password and change it slightly for each site based on the name. Takes 5 seconds to remember and nobody's getting in unless they're specifically targeting me which let's be real nobody cares about my Netflix account that much.

christopher_sullivan11d ago

Yeah, @parker_park8 that's pretty much the trade-off. A single strong master password is your whole lock, but at least it's one lock you can actually make solid instead of 50 weak ones. I started using one after the Lastpass breach made me nervous, but honestly I just picked a long passphrase I can actually remember and called it good enough.