Password managers exist solely to make it easier for other people to hack your passwords.
You don't share your passwords for anything important with anybody or *anything*. You don't. The really important ones you write down in a book (which is more secure than anything on line) - actually these days the best backup is to write them all down in a book for backup. A notebook at home is a lot more secure than a file on a machine. But if you're going to have a lot of them, you need to develop your own password rules to manage all of it by.
And never use 3-factor / 2-factor, whatever they're calling it. That exists solely to make it easier to hack your password.
Cloud storage is never secure because the company it's at looks at it. Their employees look at it. If the company thinks you're breaking the law, they share it with the police. If the employees think it's cool, or they can make money with it, they'll use it. You don't control it. If you need data storage, buy or make your own and keep it at home. Behind a firewall, on a private network. Phones are not secure devices because they are easily hacked (they all have backdoors to the OS installed), stolen, cloned, all of that. So if you need to access it remotely, use a laptop or a tablet that can be made secure, and build your access with care and don't put anything truly critical or private on that server.
Completely agree. Modern Computers try to force cloud storage, every time I have an update, I have to tell this stupid machine, "No you dumb bastard, I do not want to put that on my "one drive" I want to put that on my computer, which I own, in my fucking house!" The cloud not only allows someone else to access my data, often as easily as I can access it myself, and not only puts me at the mercy of some other mother, who now owns the computer my data is on, BUT if I don't have internet access, I can't get at the data. That alone has caused me pain.
Let's face it, cloud storage is just too darn convenient for a lot of things. Password managers come to mind - everybody has two phones, three laptops, and a password count best measured in scientific notation. Having a single list isn't practical if it's only accessible on one device.
Two solutions I've found. One, is to use a common set of files that's shared among machines manually, using free tools. Windows used to have SyncToy, which worked great; there are free alternates that work okay or you can write your own script e.g. with robocopy. But this is a manual process requiring connecting and disconnecting the common drive, and it also isn't very helpful for phones.
The other is a private cloud storage solution, e.g. a Synology server on your home network, that lets you access it from elsewhere on the web. That will also let you tie in your phones etc. That of course adds risk, but still your visibility is a lot lower than Dropbox if you're a normal person. ("Security by obscurity" isn't a good plan but it could help the odds.)
That's nice (synology.) There is another way. Send yourself an email with all your passwords as an enclosure. Then open it and file it in the archives or some place. As long as you can get your emails, you can get your password, and if they've hacked your email account, well they probably have everything already. Believe it or not, that was the solution recomended by DOW IT guys, for that reason: "If they're into your email, they have it all anyway, and your email is two part verification, (CAC and password) so getting in it is tough, as long as you're not careless with your CAC.
I am not a computer wonk but have worked on the far, far fringes of that three letter agency in Washington D.C. that begins with "N__". They have been batch recording everything that goes over a wire or through the airwaves for 6+ decades. They're a fair hand at deciphering and breaking encryptions. My own belief is that if it's transmitted, said, seen or heard it's hacked, or hackable when they want to get around to it. The only thing that is "saving" most people is that there is so much data and so few paid analysts. We'd all be wise to remember what Laventiy Beria said: "Show me the man, and I will show you the crime".
I threw a polite tantrum when they suggested going to cloud storage for [redacted agency] criminal history records and identification data. My rebuttal tagline was that, on [redacted agency] servers, it's your data as long as you maintain good security; in the cloud, it's your data as long as your vendor agrees it's yours.
Password managers exist solely to make it easier for other people to hack your passwords.
You don't share your passwords for anything important with anybody or *anything*. You don't. The really important ones you write down in a book (which is more secure than anything on line) - actually these days the best backup is to write them all down in a book for backup. A notebook at home is a lot more secure than a file on a machine. But if you're going to have a lot of them, you need to develop your own password rules to manage all of it by.
And never use 3-factor / 2-factor, whatever they're calling it. That exists solely to make it easier to hack your password.
Cloud storage is never secure because the company it's at looks at it. Their employees look at it. If the company thinks you're breaking the law, they share it with the police. If the employees think it's cool, or they can make money with it, they'll use it. You don't control it. If you need data storage, buy or make your own and keep it at home. Behind a firewall, on a private network. Phones are not secure devices because they are easily hacked (they all have backdoors to the OS installed), stolen, cloned, all of that. So if you need to access it remotely, use a laptop or a tablet that can be made secure, and build your access with care and don't put anything truly critical or private on that server.
Completely agree. Modern Computers try to force cloud storage, every time I have an update, I have to tell this stupid machine, "No you dumb bastard, I do not want to put that on my "one drive" I want to put that on my computer, which I own, in my fucking house!" The cloud not only allows someone else to access my data, often as easily as I can access it myself, and not only puts me at the mercy of some other mother, who now owns the computer my data is on, BUT if I don't have internet access, I can't get at the data. That alone has caused me pain.
Let's face it, cloud storage is just too darn convenient for a lot of things. Password managers come to mind - everybody has two phones, three laptops, and a password count best measured in scientific notation. Having a single list isn't practical if it's only accessible on one device.
Two solutions I've found. One, is to use a common set of files that's shared among machines manually, using free tools. Windows used to have SyncToy, which worked great; there are free alternates that work okay or you can write your own script e.g. with robocopy. But this is a manual process requiring connecting and disconnecting the common drive, and it also isn't very helpful for phones.
The other is a private cloud storage solution, e.g. a Synology server on your home network, that lets you access it from elsewhere on the web. That will also let you tie in your phones etc. That of course adds risk, but still your visibility is a lot lower than Dropbox if you're a normal person. ("Security by obscurity" isn't a good plan but it could help the odds.)
That's nice (synology.) There is another way. Send yourself an email with all your passwords as an enclosure. Then open it and file it in the archives or some place. As long as you can get your emails, you can get your password, and if they've hacked your email account, well they probably have everything already. Believe it or not, that was the solution recomended by DOW IT guys, for that reason: "If they're into your email, they have it all anyway, and your email is two part verification, (CAC and password) so getting in it is tough, as long as you're not careless with your CAC.
I am not a computer wonk but have worked on the far, far fringes of that three letter agency in Washington D.C. that begins with "N__". They have been batch recording everything that goes over a wire or through the airwaves for 6+ decades. They're a fair hand at deciphering and breaking encryptions. My own belief is that if it's transmitted, said, seen or heard it's hacked, or hackable when they want to get around to it. The only thing that is "saving" most people is that there is so much data and so few paid analysts. We'd all be wise to remember what Laventiy Beria said: "Show me the man, and I will show you the crime".
I threw a polite tantrum when they suggested going to cloud storage for [redacted agency] criminal history records and identification data. My rebuttal tagline was that, on [redacted agency] servers, it's your data as long as you maintain good security; in the cloud, it's your data as long as your vendor agrees it's yours.
Local plant is going cloud-based. Hubby’s local programs he wrote are getting phased out.