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A friend in Austin showed me how easy it is to see saved Wi-Fi passwords
We were at his place last month and he needed to get his printer online. He pulled up his laptop's network settings and in about ten seconds, he showed me the plain text password for his home network that Windows had saved. He just said, 'If someone gets on your computer, they get all your logins.' I had no idea it was that simple to find. Has anyone set up a better way to manage their Wi-Fi passwords so they aren't just sitting there?
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wade_dixon5mo ago
Isn't it crazy how something so important is just sitting there in plain sight? I felt the same shock when I first saw that. It makes you wonder why the system is even set up that way, right? Your friend's point about someone getting on your computer is exactly what worries me. Using a separate password manager for that stuff sounds like the smart move. It's a pain, but so is finding out someone's been using your internet.
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sullivan.quinn3mo ago
@kellyallen yeah it's wild how normal that whole thing is... but here's something nobody's bringing up. What about people who use their work laptop for personal stuff too? I've seen IT guys at my old job just go into the network settings of any machine on the domain and pull saved passwords remotely if they wanted to. So even if you have a password manager on your personal devices, if you ever connected to your home wifi on a work laptop that password is sitting right there for any sysadmin or whoever to grab. That's the angle that gets me.
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shane1655mo ago
My old roommate in college used to do that to get free internet from our neighbors. He'd borrow a laptop, find their saved network password in the settings, and then just connect all his own stuff. It was way too easy. I started using a password manager after that, not just for websites but to store the wifi key too, so it's not just sitting in plain text on the machine. You have to open the manager and unlock it with a master password first. It adds one extra step but feels way more secure.
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kellyallen5mo ago
Seriously, that's wild. Your old roommate had some nerve. Good call on the password manager though, that extra step is totally worth it.
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