What a nightmare they are. Getting some new furniture so got a credit card with 2 years interest free to spread the cost. Setting up the account has taken me about 40 minutes just trying to set up the password, security questions, online pins downloading the app to generate a secure log in. I get the need for security but I've ended up with that many accounts and different criteria for passwords and security questions ect I've just got them all wrote down in safe place. I appreciate that defeats the object but if I didn't I would never get logged in. Many are now just on my phone using either fingerprint or face recognition. Does anyone else find it exhausting trying to manage all these accounts?
Strongly recommend a password vault. I use 1Password, but others are available, e.g. FastPass, Dashlane.
Probably should look into something just never have. Day to day it isn't a big thing as most are on my phone as apps with the biometric log in. I can certainly see why people who aren't comfortable with technology are worried about everything being online now
I've looked into these password managers before, but if they are hacked, are you any better off? Secondly, I don't like paying for something like this. Lastpass did used to be free, but only for one machine which seems a little pointless.
I use Roboform, costs about £10 a year (look out for offers or beg them!). It syncs across all devices/platforms. Just make sure your Master Password isn't something like ABC123. I think they are all secure until them there Quantum computers come along. Alternatively Firefox has a password manager.
It's work passwords that annoy me, have to change them every 30 days so I just use some variation of Password1 because the policy is stupid like that.
From personal experience, I can recommend not dropping your phone and making it unusuable now, particularly the day before you need to pay half a dozen people their wages! If you can't log into an app or receive a code for 2FA then it can be an absolute nightmare - I literally couldn't make any transactions until I'd bought and activated a new phone. And I got into a horrible loop with Barclaycard whereby I couldn't get a new card because I couldn't order it through the app, but I couldn't install the app on my new phone because my old card had expired. I've got a system for passwords which I'm pretty sure makes them as secure as I need them to be, but once they start stipulating a certain number of lower case letters, upper case letters, numbers and other special characters then it all goes out the window. I'm almost certain that my passwords for those kinds of services are much weaker than the ones for which I'm allowed to use my own system, because I end up doing something similar. And then you've got the (very few, thankfully) websites which don't even allow certain characters in their passwords...
I just have a string of letter with a number on the end and every time it comes to change, I just up the number by 1. I am up to 72 now.
I have my passwords written down in a big red book marked "PASSWORDS". I'm hoping someone will steal it, access my online banking, see the pitiful state of my finances, and make a small deposit.
This would a real issue for me if I left my current employer because, given that for 25 years, I have always had a job that comes with a work phone, back to the mid 90s when having a phone was unusual (I was the first person I knew who had one), it means i have never actually had my own phone on a contract i pay for because i always just use my work phone. But there are so many instances where i need to use a code texted to me for 2FA, that if i had to hand it back, i would be knackered. I would need to buy a phone and persuade them to pass the number to me.
I'd definitely recommend getting a cheap PAYG phone or something and migrating your personal stuff to that, just in case! It generally works by SMS so anything will do. I'm seriously considering having one that just sits in my desk drawer and is used solely for it, basically acting as my own personal verification machine.
If you do that, make sure you make a call on it every so often. I got a phone for my parents, but they often lose the number making the whole emergency phone thing pointless.
honest is answer is yes - everything can be hacked. but there are things you can do, to make it highly unlikely, e.g. hashing, auto refresh, password generation etc. which these vaults do. A lot of people for example, have a password they can memorise, then use that same password for everything, which is crackers. they also do other things, like trawl dark web for breaches etc. for the sake of £35 a year, I think it's worth every penny
