That time an old coworker showed me his password notebook

Back in 2018, I had this coworker named Phil who must have been in his 60s. He kept a little spiral notebook in his desk drawer with all his passwords written down, and I mean every single one for every site he used. I asked him about it once and he just laughed and said 'been doing it this way since 1995, never got hacked once.' It kind of stuck with me because here I was using a password manager and still getting phished twice that year. Has anyone else met someone who does the analog thing and actually makes it work?

2 comments

2 Comments

rowanp154d ago

Gotta push back a little on this one. Phil having a notebook isn't some genius system, it's just luck and a small attack surface. If he's got 20 passwords in that book and they're all for low-stakes sites like some old forum or a local news login, then sure, nobody's targeting that. But the second he puts his banking password in there and that book grows legs or gets left on a bus, it's game over. I had a neighbor who did the same thing, and his whole notebook got swiped from his car when someone smashed the window for a bag he left visible. Digital password managers have real security flaws too, but at least they encrypt everything and you can lock them with two-factor. Phil just got comfortable with something that's a single point of failure if anyone ever decides to flip through his desk.

patricia_wright3d ago

Honestly, that "single point of failure" bit reminds me of my uncle who kept his will and all his important papers in a shoebox under his bed. The dog peed on it during a thunderstorm and he lost half his records. I guess with Phil's notebook you could at least argue nobody's phishing a physical book, but water damage or a nosy kid is way more likely than some digital heist.