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?

2 comments

2 Comments

skyler_kim155d 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.

umab355d ago

But what about when that one site gets hacked?