A safe way to keep your password on your PC (Goodguy Ernie Method)
I just signed up a few minutes ago and, full disclosure. I'm not a hacker. Not even close. But I had what I think is a pretty clever idea and wanted to know what the experts thought. This will probably be my first and last post. I hope you like it.
I’ve always been told by security "experts" to never keep my password(s) on my computer. But what about this scenario?
I’m keeping an unencrypted .txt file on an unencrypted hard drive on a PC with no password, no firewall, and a router that’s still set to admin/admin.
The file (which is the only thing on my desktop) is called: “THIS DOCUMENT CONTAINS MY MASTER PASSWORD FOR MY PASSWORD MANAGER. PLEASE DON’T DO ANYTHING BAD, OKAY?”
Inside is a single string of characters. Could be 5,000, could be 1,000,000 depending on how secure I want to feel. Somewhere in that big mess is my actual password, an uninterrupted substring between 8 and 30 characters long.
To find it, I just Ctrl+F for a small string of digits I remember. It might be 4 to 8 characters long and is somewhere near my real password (before, after, beginning, end, whatever I choose). I know where to start and where to stop.
For example, pretend this is part of the full string: 4z4LGb3TVdkSWNQoL9!l&TZHHUBO6DFCU6!czZy0v@2G3R2Vs2JOX&ow)
My password is: WNQoL9!l&TZHHUBO6DFCU6!*czZy0v
I know to search for WNQo and stop when I hit @.
So, what do you think?
Is it safe to store my password like this on my PC?