About a month ago, my roommate came home from work and told me that her bank account was hacked and drained of a huge amount of money. She has been saving for business school for about 8 years so the amount stolen was in the mid-five-figures. While we will probably never definitively know how hackers gained access to drain her account of that much money, it’s my guess that it was because she was reusing passwords and her bank account’s reused password was compromised in a leak.
Upon learning about this, I started thinking about all of the people in my life that could easily fall victim to this. I’ve seen everything from people keeping passwords written down in a note in their phone to people who use the same 4-5 passwords on every website they log into. Did I mention I used to be one of these people? These days, I use a password manager that my fellow engineers at Movable Ink helped me set up. So far, I’m up to 360 accounts that are saved in my vault. Did you catch that - three hundred and sixty accounts! Nobody could possibly remember 360 strong passwords.
After asking a few of my close friends if they would be interested in learning more, and hearing that they would, I decided to create a 1-pager. The 1-pager is a simple guide of what to do to make your accounts more secure by getting a password manager, setting up MFA, migrating accounts into the password manager, and changing your passwords.
After I was finished writing up everything I knew myself, I decided that our engineering team was the best resource I had to solicit feedback on my 1-pager. I wrote a little blurb on what inspired it and explained that I wanted to be sure it was at a level that even someone like my parents could understand, and I slacked it out and asked for any and all feedback. I was really pleased with all of the helpful feedback I received. Feedback ranged from places where I could add a link to other topics I could touch on like suggesting a credit report freeze. It felt great that our engineering team was so supportive and genuinely wanted to help—some even said they would send the 1-pager to their parents as well.
Around the same time I was writing up the one-pager, our women’s Employee Resource Group, Movable Pink, was in talks with Techfest Club about hosting a talk in our office. The Techfest founder had seen my 1-pager and asked that I give a talk on this. Because I had already written the 1-pager and gotten such great feedback on it, I felt completely comfortable and prepared for this.
The talk went really well and I even had someone at Movable Ink ask to sit down so I could do an even more in-depth overview for her. There’s strength in numbers, and it can be really helpful to have someone that has been through this process serve as a resource for you when you’re getting started. Here is a copy of my 1-pager. Feel free to share it with friends or family or it use it yourself!