Appreciation post for 2FA after my own password got leaked in 2018

I used the same password for everything for like 10 years. Then one day my Xbox account got logged into from Russia and I realized that password was on some dump from a forum I joined in 2007. That was the moment I finally set up two factor authentication on my email first, then every other site. Has anyone else had that rude wake up call from a breach you forgot about?

3 comments

3 Comments

nancy4751mo agoMost Upvoted

Isn't that a bit overkill for just a gaming account though?

nancybailey1mo ago

God no, it's not overkill. I had a friend who thought the same thing and just used the same password for her gaming stuff and her email and bank. Then her Steam account got taken over and someone used the email to reset her PayPal password. They drained her account before she even woke up. Took her months to get that money back from the bank. She now has 2FA on everything including her Netflix account. After watching her go through that mess I set it up on everything too.

the_tessa2d ago

Oh man, that friend's story makes my blood run cold. I remember sitting there watching my Xbox login alert pop up from Russia and just feeling this hollow pit in my stomach. Like all of a sudden everything I'd built online felt super fragile. I was lucky it was just a gaming account with no payment info attached, but the panic was real. After that I spent a whole weekend going through every single account I could think of, even ones from old livejournal and neopets days. It's scary how one slip up can domino into your whole digital life if you don't lock things down.

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