You're using the same password for your bank, your email, and that pizza rewards app you signed up for in 2019 to save $2 on breadsticks. Those breadsticks may end up being very expensive.
Here's why reusing passwords is basically handing a master key to every burglar on the internet and why they don't even have to work hard to use it.
The math is brutal. The attackers are lazy. That's the scary part.
When a company gets breached, and companies get breached constantly, attackers take those username/password combos and run them against every other site they can think of: Gmail, LinkedIn, your corporate VPN, your bank. This is called credential stuffing, and it’s not sophisticated. It's not a guy in a hoodie writing custom exploit code at 2:00 am surrounded by empty Red Bull cans. It's a script running automatically while the attacker is asleep or watching Netflix.
You lost to a cron job. And that's the humbling part.
One breach at a low-stakes site becomes the skeleton key to your entire digital life.
The pizza app isn't the problem. Your email is.
Most people think, "Who cares if they get into my DoorDash account?" But what if that password also unlocks your email? Now they own your email, and your email is the reset link for everything else: your bank, your brokerage, your work SSO. It's a domino effect that not even John McClane could stop once it starts.
Yippee-ki-yay, indeed.
The fix isn’t complicated. It's just mildly inconvenient.
Get rid of the Post-it note stuck to your monitor and use a password manager. I don't care which one; just pick a reputable one, and start today. Let it create a random, 20-character string for every single site. You don't need to remember the passwords. You don't even need to understand them. That's the whole point. You’re outsourcing memorization to software, which is exactly what software is for.
Then turn on multi-factor authentication wherever it's offered. Yes, even on the pizza app. Especially on the pizza app. You've already proven that those breadsticks mean a lot to you.
When you create long, unique, random passwords and add MFA, credential stuffing goes absolutely nowhere. Attackers are trying to find the path of least resistance so they move on to easier prey. And you are no longer easier prey.
Thirty years in this field and I still see breaches that trace directly back to a reused password from a site that doesn't even exist anymore. The site is gone. The credential leaked. The habit never changed. The damage happened anyway.
The savings on those breadstick aren’t worth handing over the keys to everything else.