Let me tell you something about Betteridge’s law for headlines
This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no.” The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it
Thank you so much for introducing me to this
Cybersecurity is expensive and doesn’t contribute directly to profits. It can prevent serious damages (legal, financial, and reputation) but that requires long-term thinking. Most executives don’t look past quarterly earnings.
On the other end, prevent malicious actors from using identity theft to get credit cards and loans: freeze your credit.
- Transunion: https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze
- Experian: https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html
- Equifax: https://www.equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services/credit-freeze/
It’ll be a minor hassle when you go to get a car loan, and forget that your credit is frozen - but you will be able to temporarily unfreeze it from your phone.
id recommend custom email addresses… most places let you tack on arbitrary strings to your email address or if you have your own domain, you can just forward all and use anyname@yourdomain on the fly.
no single system compromise can affect any other system
I’m actually gonna go a step further and recommend using email aliases.
Firefox Relay, AnonAddy, Proton, etc.
yeah that will give you ‘reply’ ability, but ive noticed i almost never actually need that extra bit.
Well, it gives you privacy, because your accounts are not tied to your domain.
Additionally anyone who finds out you’re using a catch-all can spam you with 100 different email addresses and it’s like spam callers who call you from 100 different numbers, you can’t block them all.
I speak from experience.
But many sites don’t support that, unfortunately.
DHL for example will happily create an account for you with the “mail+xyz@gmail”, but will sometimes drop the suffix internally. You can’t reset your password for example. Super annoying.
Use a password manager. Every account gets a different (and strong) password.
Additionally, I use simplelogin so they also gotta match unique passwords with my unique emails and then get past 2fa.
All cool and dandy, until you have to type that random 50 letter string on your TV.
Many PW managers let you generate passphrases, which are all around better than random strings. Length is the most important factor so
finance-caffeine-utopia-redress-unseen
Is way stronger and easier to remember (and type) than
Fl7$j4FWw)&5O
Is it really safer? I mean when trying to bruteforce a password, one would have to make a guess whether it’s a passphrase or not. But if you decided to check for pass phrases, wouldn’t the one you posted be cracked in 5 times the amount of words in that dictionary? I’m not sure how large the vocabularies of the generators are, but I would guess a random 17 char password might be safer than a 5 phrases password?
For symmetric keys, since they cannot be weakened using quantum computing, their strength can be assessed by their bit-equivalent amount of entropy:
- 40 bit or less - easily breakable
- 64 bit - not so easy, but doable
- 128 bit or more - basically unbreakable
Those are equivalent to, respectively:
- 0-9 - 12, 19, 38 characters
- a-z - 9, 14, 28 characters
- a-z0-9 - 8, 12, 25 characters
- A-Za-z0-9 - 7, 11, 22 characters
- A-Za-z0-9+special - 7, 10, 21 characters
Moral of the story: drop the special characters, and even the numbers… and even the uppercase. A 30+ character long all-lowercase pass phrase, is already unbreakable.
Check @falsemirror@beehaw.org:
finance-caffeine-utopia-redress
-unseen
…is already over 128 bits.
You don’t need to make it that long.
And also most TVs or whatever you’re streaming with has a way to type from your phone nowadays. Apple TV, Chromecast, Android TV, heck I think even Xbox.
It’s kinda nice on Apple TV your phone will suggest autofill passwords for the TV, even from theirs party password managers like Bitwarden.
Android tv’s arent that old. 10 years max. 5 years since it’s affordable for most people. Is it unreasonable to own a 5 year old non-smart tv? I think not. I think it’s weird that so many people assume everyone owns a smart tv.
Obviously any reputable password manager is better than none at all, but I strongly recommend using KeepassXC on the desktop and a suitable mobile client for phones and tablets, and syncing the database across devices with an encrypted peer to peer sync tool like Synching.
I’ve always been nervous about being part of a large, juicy cloud hosted target, and LastPass was the proof that those concerns are well-founded.
KeepassDX for mobile is on F-Droid and can use the same file as accessed from KeepassXC from Laptop, synced by Syncthing.
