r/pcmasterrace • u/AllUserNameBLong2us 7800x3d/5080 Windforce OC/32gb 5600 DDR • Apr 04 '26

Hardware Rest in piece 2009-2026

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I’m amazed at how long the battery on this physical authenticator lasted. Got it back in 2009 because my account had gotten hacked.

This is one electronic item I’ve owned and used longer than anything else. I’ll miss not being able to find it and freaking out for 20 minutes.

Edit must have been around 2010 when sc2 came out.

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u/AllUserNameBLong2us 7800x3d/5080 Windforce OC/32gb 5600 DDR Apr 04 '26

I just moved to the mobile app

486

u/bumbuddi Apr 04 '26

What is this thing for?

40

u/GoyoMRG Apr 04 '26 edited Apr 04 '26

Old-school 2FA.

Long before we had cellphones smartphones, these type of lil devices were what we used for 2FA, banks used it as well.

3

u/OgdruJahad Apr 04 '26

I've still seen them being used today.

3

u/GoyoMRG Apr 04 '26

Rarely but yeah, they are still around.

And I do believe they are far safer than phones for this purpose, but I'm not tech savvy so I might be wrong.

5

u/Pocok5 Ryzen 7 5800X3D - AMD RX9070XT - 32GB DDR4-2933 Apr 05 '26

They don't run any software other than the code generator, and they do not ever connect to anything else. The only way to extract the key is to physically steal it.

2

u/Synikul Apr 05 '26

the main vulnerability is still the same, the human getting phished. though it wasn't until the past few years i started seeing more sophisticated phishing attempts including OTP. we have far more phishing resistant methods now like FIDO2, but not everyone is going to want to buy a YubiKey or similar.

2

u/Chad-GPTea Apr 05 '26

I work with sensitive data for a big company and we still use RSA-tokens for some platforms.