Who TF isn’t using a password manager in 2025? Like how would you even function?
EDIT: Y’all need to stop replying with your password generation strategies. JFC it’s like you’re asking someone to pwn your shit.
I use modified “HorseBatteryStaple” style passwords. I have a couple base phrases that I always remember, with special characters and numbers inserted. I modify them bit by bit for different sites, and keep a list of the changes - only the changes. Anyone who looks at the list would see random words, numbers, or symbols without context; only I know how it all fits together.
For example, let’s pretend HorseBatteryStaple1! Is my default password. I may have “cell phone, machine 5” on the list. That would mean the password for my cell phone’s payment website modifies the default password by changing one of the words in HorseBatteryStaple to “machine” and the number 1 to 5.
I know password managers exist, but I like to try to remember my own passwords. Especially since I may need them across different devices, including my work laptop that I can’t download new programs onto.
Caution, reusing parts of your passwords like that significantly reduces the effective entropy.
If someone finds HorseBatteryStaple1! in a plaintext leak, then they only need to guess one word and one number to get your phone password (assuming they know your format or use a matching heuristic).
So using a combination of this comment and an existing leaked DB (trust me, your credentials have leaked somewhere at some point), all your accounts could be trivially cracked.
Because they seem to fall into two categories. Those that have been compromised
And those who haven’t… Yet
I basically use a childhood limerick in leetspeak. Easy to remember, tough to Crack. Like for example, Peter Piper pickedna peck of pickled peppers becomes “P3t3rP1p3rP1ck3d4P3ck0fP1ckl3dP3pp3rz!” Of course I never used that particular one, but you get the idea.
Federal and State jobs you can’t use password managers.
Yeah idk about that. I’ve worked in state govt for a very long time and our cybersecurity controls essentially mandates we use one. I’m also in our security audit team and have to talk to state offices about our NIST controls regularly. And the NIST DOD controls are even more stringent than ours. Something sounds off.
I literally work for a state government and I use password managers for both work and personal.
EDIT: For clarity, the data is hosted on-prem. I don’t send govt credentials to the cloud like a moron.
I function by only having 2 accounts I actually care about. Bank and e-mail. The rest get the same password over and over because I legitimately don’t care about them and never give them real personal data.
A password manager would be the same amount of effort, but way more secure.
Get a password manager. It’s a lot more secure and easier to only have to remember one strong main password and have the rest randomly generated
^ I love Bitwarden
I enjoy self hosting it
(Rather vaultwarden)
If it’s something of vital importance, my mantra is to pay for someone else to host it.
They can have the responsibility of security / updates / etc. because a company full of people can do that better than I ever can.
That’s my reasoning as well. The only drawback I currently see for bitwarden is that it’s US based and I have zero trust in their current government not going to cut off the rest of the world at some point. I’m still using it, but I make sure to make regular encrypted backups of my vaults.
KeePassXC, donor, and I sync it with my (self-hosted) SyncThing server.
Finally can’t take it anymore
Downloads a Password Manager
Password Manager: “Please create a unique master password to begin”
That’s one password, and then use 2FA or a passkey or a yubinkey or anything to secure it so the security of the password isn’t a big deal
Then go to every single thing you have a password for, and have the password manager set it to something random. I personally like pass phrases get it up in the teens of characters multiple words multiple numbers multiple special characters. 99.9% of the time you shouldn’t be typing any of this in. It should be injected for you. If per chance you should need to type one of them in typing in four or five words some numbers and some special characters is not really a horrible grievance.
Has to be 16 characters
So long as I can use more than that, I won’t complain. I don’t remember the service, but I definitely remember one where they wouldn’t allow over a certain amount of characters and that was annoying because that was when I was still using repeat passwords back in highschool. My preferred password at the time was roughly 20 characters, but apparently that was too much because who cares about security, am I right?
It’s even worse when they have a limit and don’t enforce it consistently. I had to submit a bug report to my bank because I made a 24 character password at account creation but the login page only allowed 16 characters.
For everybody commenting on passwords manager, I’ve been using one for years now and I feel this so bad. My company has a password policy of changing the LAPTOP’s password every 8 weeks and you can’t reuse any of the last 10 passwords used. I hate it because I can’t use a password manager to unlock my laptop and I’m so used to password managers by now that it’s getting really hard to come up with new passwords that follow the stupid requirements and even worse remembering them. I’m veeeery close to just start noting them down in a notebook by my machine and then send a picture to our security guy to show him where he has gotten us all to
You should do that unironically. The current best practices advises against frequent password changes for exactly that reason.
I do agree that’s a particular case that can’t be solved by a password manager. But it’s all the more reason to use one elsewhere to reduce how many you need to remember.
I have to remember only 3 secure passwords. My personal computer, my work account, and my password manager. Those are the only three I have to type in manually. And because they’re secure and unique, for stupid work password change requirements I just increment the last character.
My company has a password policy of changing the LAPTOP’s password every 8 weeks and you can’t reuse any of the last 10 passwords used.
There are more than 10 symbols, so just rotate through them. If your org doesn’t respect you enough to have reasonable password rotations, I wouldn’t bother spending much time coming up with new ones and just modify your current to pass the minimums.
Some$$Word12
Some&&Word11
Some–Word10Etc
I save it my password manager and can pull it on other devices. Still annoying, but not the worst. Honestly the worst is passwords with a character limit, and even worse when it’s “small” like 16
BatmanSupermanSpidermanCaptainAmerica@2025
Just 4 characters are enough. And it includes Cap.
!!! PASSWORD TOO WEAK !!! - your password must contains upper and lowercase characters, digits and symbols except not a hyphen for some fucking reason, and no characters you’ve ever used in past passwords and no digits that are in your postal code, data of birth, or shoe size. Zalgo text is acceptable.
TheDoctor&CaptainJack
16 characters and a cap
Huh, I only see ****************
I just checked my password manager vault and I currently have 311 passwords stored there.
I have 401 entries, but only 384 unique passwords.
Hmm. Most of these are junk from job applications that I really should put in a trash category. I’m so glad all those places don’t share a password with something important. I think.
If you don’t want to use a password manager it’s not that hard to create long passwords. Just create a nonsense sentence with a misspelling with a character between each word and add some obscure personal info that isn’t directly linked to you, like a phone number of an old childhood friend or pizza place you used to call often when you were young so it’s easy to remember but not info another person can find about you. Then add a special character.
Like:
Wideo1Pasta1Is1The1Grawy1555-22334!!!
I like pass phrases… if you can’t think of anything, grab a random book, open to a random page, and find a memorable phrase that catches your eye. Change some letters to numbers and/or add symbols if you think you need to.
And in six weeks… It’s time to change your password! No repeats.
Ah yeah ok I got you covered
RasputiaSalmon87876@
There you go, real easy.
Just add one to the number each time.
I’m on “[passwordiveusedforyears]22!” at work.
For otherwebsites I’m on things like “[passwordIveusedforyears][websitename]!”
Proper 2FA is secure enough for most people to keep using the same password so long as it hasn’t been compromised. And a few things, like work passwords, email passwords, and bank passwords should be unique to thaspecific account.
Really, the biggest security hole is requiring logins for fucking everything. That’s why there’s a million password leaks. Why does a news website need me to sign in? Why do I need an account and password to order a pizza that I’m gonna pay for in-person?
What? No punctuation marks? Special characters like !@#$%^&*()_+?
I got a “we’ve had customers accounts breached, please update your password” email the other day.
They specifically called out you can’t use # in your password, and it’s been bugging me why that is. What part if their system let’s in other special characters but # is off limits?
Now that I’m thinking about this it’s bugging me too. If they are passing it to shell scripts maybe it’s interpreted as a comment? Some databases like Oracle use # to separate schema prefix from schema user and table name in a query? But none of those would really make sense here 🤷
EDIT they are storing it in plain text, with other values using # as a delimiter? lol
I considered database stuff, but my password shouldn’t go anywhere near the database!
If they are storing it as plain text in this day and age, then there is no hope for the human race 🤦
Kiester password manager?
