My old boss swore by sticky notes for passwords, 7 years later I get it

Back in 2016 I worked at a small dental office in Tucson and the office manager, Carol, kept a yellow sticky note under her keyboard with the login for the billing software. I thought it was the dumbest thing ever, total security nightmare. She told me, "Honey, the real risk is forgetting it and calling IT at 2am, not someone sneaking into a locked back office." Three years later that office got hit with a ransomware attack through a phishing email, but Carol's system never got compromised because nobody could guess her messy handwriting or the weird symbols she added. Meanwhile our newer password manager got breached in 2022 and I spent a week resetting everything. I wouldn't go back to sticky notes, but I now keep a physical backup of my master password in a safe deposit box. Has anyone else found that low-tech solutions outlasted the fancy tools they replaced?

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the_margaret12d ago

Yep, my grandpa kept his bank PIN in a Bible and that thing outlived three different password apps.