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I thought password managers were overkill until my bank account got hit for $900 from a St. Louis gas station | Cybersecurity Tips - Chatter Central

faith_carter•28d ago

I thought password managers were overkill until my bank account got hit for $900 from a St. Louis gas station

Two months ago I was one of those people who rolled their eyes at password managers. I used the same three passwords everywhere and figured I was smart enough to spot a phishing email. Then someone skimmed my card at a pump off I-44 in St. Louis and got into my email too, because that password was the same one I used for my bank login. They ran $900 in charges before I even noticed. The part that really got me was how they did it: they logged into my email, searched for "bank statement," and found my statements sitting right there in the inbox. A friend who works IT showed me how a password manager would have stopped the email part cold, since the leaked gas station password would not open anything else. I set one up the same weekend and it took maybe 40 minutes to switch everything over. Now I am wondering what else I am leaving in my inbox that I should not be. Anyone here keep old bank statements in their email, or am I the only one who did that?

1 comments

1 Comment

richard_west6820d ago

The password manager part is solid, no argument there, but you are giving it too much credit for saving your inbox. The real problem is that your bank email and your bank login shared the same password, and that is a choice, not a tech gap. I keep statements in my inbox too, going back years, and it has never cost me a dime because a crook who gets that password still cannot get into anything else. What would have stopped the email part cold is having a separate password for your email and turning on two step verification on it, which takes five minutes and costs nothing. A password manager helps, sure, but it is not magic, and if you had reused passwords across ten sites, the manager only fixes things after you go change all ten. The bigger lesson here is not which tool you bought, it is that one password should never open two doors, and that rule was free the whole time.