It is truly upsetting to see how few people use password managers. I have witnessed people who always use the same password (and even tell me what it is), people who try to login to accounts but constantly can’t remember which credentials they used, people who store all of their passwords on a text file on their desktop, people who use a password manager but store the master password on Discord, entire tech sectors in companies locked to LastPass, and so much more. One person even told me they were upset that websites wouldn’t tell you password requirements after you create your account, and so they screenshot the requirements every time so they could remember which characters to add to their reused password.
Use a password manager. Whatever solution you think you can come up with is most likely not secure. Computers store a lot of temporary files in places you might not even know how to check, so don’t just stick it in a text file. Use a properly made password manager, such as Bitwarden or KeePassXC. They’re not going to steal your passwords. Store your master password in a safe place or use a passphrase that you can remember. Even using your browser’s password storage is better than nothing. Don’t reuse passwords, use long randomly generated ones.
It’s free, it’s convenient, it takes a few minutes to set up, and its a massive boost in security. No needing to remember passwords. No needing to come up with new passwords. No manually typing passwords. I know I’m preaching to the choir, but if even one of you decides to use a password manager after this then it’s an easy win.
Please, don’t wait. If you aren’t using a password manager right now, take a few minutes. You’ll thank yourself later.
But I wanna tell people my master password to my pw manager. It’s such a fantastic password that no one could ever possibly guess I would have. I wanna gloat.
I don’t even understand why I need to make a password for some sites anymore. They send a code to my phone everytime.to make.sure it’s me so it seems like there’s practically no point.
2FA really stands for
2 FUCKING ANNOYING !!!
One person even told me they were upset that websites wouldn’t tell you password requirements after you create your account,
To be fair, that is super fucking annoying. I hate when I tell bitwarden to save my password only to have the site come back with it being too long and only some special characters are allowed.
My favorite is the sites that silently truncate your password to a maximum length only they know, before storing it. Then when you come back you have to guess which substring of your password they actually used before you can log in. Resetting doesn’t help unless you realize they’re doing this and use a short one.
My favorite was the password set screen allowing up to 64 characters, but login fails if the password is over 32 chars.
I use a password pattern. I have hundreds of different passwords all stored in my head and all between 10-20 characters long. The trick is to have a deterministic formula for picking a password.
Example: short word + First 6 in url + symbol + short word capitalised + number
Let’s say the first word is cat and second is dog, symbol is - and number is 5 and you have a Gmail it would give you
“catgmail-Dog5”
https://www.passwordmonster.com/ gives it 61 years to crack this one but if you use longer words you get better times.
