A wonderful gift for a vulnerable relative. Although it should really come with 1234 prewritten as all with the passwords for everything
by Scrolling2Oblivian
A wonderful gift for a vulnerable relative. Although it should really come with 1234 prewritten as all with the passwords for everything
by Scrolling2Oblivian
24 comments
It’s okay if the bit that says password logbook slips off to make it a bit more nondescript.
My elders scribble it on paper, then lose paper so that you get to chain your way through account resets until you have a password.
I would make it much smaller, most older people I know use the same password for everything, so it’ll be one line under “everything”
You might be better off showing them how to set up a password manager.
Much easier for them to simply verify using their fingerprint and it logging in for them rather than them having to sift through the book and find the password every time.
Not so shit on your gift, but working in IT this screams “NOOOOO” to me.
Set up a password manager on their device(s), set up strong passwords for their services and save them to said password manager. Set it up to autofill.
Add yourself as an admin also if possible. And, if you can, if they have an android phone set up Google Family Link and set yourself as the parent (you can do it on your iPhone also).
My mum isn’t especially old, recently retirement age, but she’s terrible with technology and I’d be getting calls and messages on the regular to provide support. Since doing the above she’s had no issues.
Writing down passwords like this is in a book that says “hey unscrupulous person that’s made my way into my home, here’s how to access all my important information”.
Just takes one food delivery driver, electrician, health visitor, etc for the above to become a problem.
Security researchers today have backed off from the “DON’T WRITE YOUR PASSWORDS DOWN!” schtick. The ideal is to use a digital password manager that randomly generates passwords and have that secured with a strong key. But writing your passwords down and keeping them in a non-public place is *so much* more secure than just reusing one password.
Similarly, the older advice to force password changes every X days is being walked back. Doing that just caused folk to create a fairly logical system to increment their password (adding 1 to a number at the end usually, or adding the month so by the time the annual cycle is up you’re free to reuse the original).
A logbook for passwords is a good idea.
I’m not sure if clearly labelling it is such a good idea though.
What if someone breaks in and spots it?
It is better to have a different password for every website and write them down, than to reuse the same password and keep it in your head.
The most likely vulnerability is one website you use getting hacked, and then the login details from that site being reused on other sites.
If you can, use a password manager. If you can’t, get a book.
I work in cybersec and this is more secure than most cloud solutions. Hackers have to physically break into your home to get it, and you would know its been compromised.
Lots of people had these in Deus Ex. It made the game a bit easier.
Isn’t this how Sirius Black got into the Gryffindor common room? Then again he ended up being one of the good guys so maybe it was all for the best
My mum has lost several, once with a load of bank info! She keeps leaving them in cafe’s on holiday, WHY ARE YOU TAKING THEM OUT THE HOUSE?!?!?!??!
When I first had PINs they went in the phone book under fake names and phone numbers e.g. Lloyd’s bank entered as Linda Brown with a fake number ending with the PIN. I still use coding in my phone books but with a lot of decoys and trust that I am not worth burglarising and decoding.
The venn diagram of people looking for passwords for websites and people breaking into homes is almost 2 circles. This is secure because it encourages people to use a different password on every site. Obviously it isnt as secure as using autogenerated passwords saved in a vault, but they are associated with very different risks
Make sure the first page clearly explains that fraudsters will try to make friends with you and confuse you into giving away your passwords
Ah yes, I too am a fan of environmental storytelling.
Would you be a dear and show us how the pages are formatted inside? Thanks 🙂
The perfect over 60s Christmas gift.
Use a software key safe on a laptop that isn’t internet connected, in a safe, hidden in your house
It’s probably way more secure than some of the password managers out there like LastPass lol.
Ok but… write it on a sheet of paper, fold it up, and hide it somewhere completely random and bizarre – somewhere nobody would ever think to look. Don’t write them in a book that you keep next to your computer with a big sign saying “PASSWORDS ARE KEPT HERE”.
Good to have one that looks like something else, such as an “art book” or cook book on outside/first few pages but then has the pages for ya passwords, even if ya robbefd in real I doubt they want to look through every single book.
You need physical access to get to it, that’s not as easy as it sound and the payyoff isn’t worth any of the risk in 99.9% of cases.
You do have a “In case of my death” printed document, right?
When I was a kid in the 90s, my mum gave me a book like “how to use the World Wide Web” for children. At the back was a space for you to write down the URLs of your favourite websites.
In reality this is probably more secure than most people currently operate, to view this someone has to have gained access to your house and find it.
Add in a small bit of obfuscation and it’s next to useless to the casual burglar.
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