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My neighbor's password advice almost got my email hacked
Last month my neighbor told me to use the same password for everything because it was easier to remember. I thought he was joking, but he was dead serious. I ignored him and stuck with my weird long passphrase for my main account, and that same week his email got emptied by some scammer in the Philippines. He lost access to his bank alerts for 3 days before he could fix it. Has anyone else had to talk someone out of reusing passwords, or am I the only one dealing with stubborn folks?
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rose_grant781mo ago
Dealt with the same thing with my own brother last year. What finally worked was sitting down with him and showing him that free password managers exist, so he didn't have to remember anything at all. He kept saying it was too much work until I set the whole thing up for him in about ten minutes on his laptop. Once he saw it fill in the login by itself, he was sold and never went back to his old "one password for everything" habit. Sometimes people just need to see how easy the fix is instead of hearing a lecture about it. So you are not alone, and your neighbor is lucky he only lost three days of bank alerts.
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