Indeed. And I think with the delay needed to connect and waiting for the phone company to say “That number doesn’t exist” would make it even worse for the spammers. Let’s say it takes one second to connect and get a “number doesn’t exist” message. That would be 64^128 seconds, or about 5e+214 billion years (if my calculations are correct). The universe may not even last that long.
Even if each call takes one nanosecond, and the spammers have software that makes a trillion calls at once, you’d still have a whole lot of numbers to try.
We have a 30 day expiration where I work. It’s my absolute favorite thing to be reminded by windows that I should change my password 15 days after I changed it.
It sounds like you’re happy with BitWarden, but it’s worth mentioning (at least for others), that KeePass supports Two Factor through a plugin named KeeOTP.
I also use KeePass, and recommend it for anyone so long as they’re willing to put in the work. KeePass has a active plugin development community, and there are a number of quality of life improvements available. Here are the plugins/extensions I’m currently using above the base KeePass experience:
This generates passphrases like “Correct Horse Battery Staple”. I use this for passwords I might conceivably have to type in, like my primary account password at work.
Just like above, but for Chrome. I find it doesn’t work quite as well, though.
For mobile, I use KeePass2Android and store my password file in Google Drive for easy access. Additionally, I have purchased an InputStick to make logging in at work a bit easier. I’ve barely seen my last few passwords.
I should probably turn this into its own post at some point…
Extensions like PassIFox and ChromeIPass can help with these, but you can also use the built-in AutoType functionality in KeePass, or use the KeePass2Android keyboard on mobile. I try to avoid copying and pasting passwords when I can since just about any other program can read the clipboard.
Planck time (in seconds) (Pt)= ~ 5 x 10-44 s
Age of the universe (in seconds) (A)= ~ 4.32 x 1017 s
Number of atoms in the universe (U) = ~ 1082
U x (A/Pt) = ~8.6 x 10142.
Number of possible phone “numbers” = ~ 1.6x10231
Chance of winning the Powerball: 1:3x108
Turn every atom of the universe into a zombie PC, have the interval between each attempted call be equal to Planck time, run your zombies for as long as the universe is thought to have existed so far, and you’d still be (much) more likely to have won the Powerball ten times in a row than to have called one of the 7 billion numbers corresponding to a person on Earth.
(Edit: multiplied by the most significant digits of Planck time, rather than divided. Math error fixed).
(Edit #2 and #3:And mucked up the Powerball chances when converting into scientific notation. Only ten wins in a row, not twelve).
