Question about a student who thought a strong password was enough

A kid in my 8th grade class in Denver last month argued that his 12-character password with symbols made him 'unhackable,' so I had to explain why he still needed two-factor authentication on his gaming account.

2 comments

2 Comments

wren_rodriguez5d ago

Oh man, that's a classic. I just read an article about how hackers don't even try to guess passwords anymore for big sites. They just buy lists of logins from other site breaches (since people reuse passwords) and try those. So his super strong password is useless if he used it somewhere else that got hacked. That's the whole point of two-factor, it stops that kind of login in its tracks.

jake_martin165d ago

But what if the two-factor system gets hit too? I've seen cases where they bypass it with SIM swaps or just trick the user into approving the login.