My nephew's 'just use the same password' advice almost cost me everything

A few months back, my 22 year old nephew told me I was overthinking things by using a password manager. He said just use one strong password for everything and write it down on a piece of paper in your wallet. I figured he was young and knew tech stuff, so I tried it for about two weeks. Then I got a fraud alert from my bank in Austin about a login attempt from a different state. Turned out someone skimmed my card info at a gas station and used that same password to try my email too. I spent six hours on the phone canceling cards and changing passwords. Now I use a different password for every site and keep them in Bitwarden. Has anyone else had a family member give them bad security advice that backfired?

2 comments

2 Comments

wyattbennett16d ago

Blame your nephew's generation for normalizing this shortcut - they grew up with single sign-ons through Google and Facebook, so they never had to learn the hard way like we did.

richardharris16d ago

Wait, @wyattbennett isn't it kind of the opposite though? Like I've seen kids get locked out of entire game accounts because they clicked "sign in with Google" and forgot which email they used. In my experience that shortcut actually creates more headaches than old school passwords ever did.