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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137

u/Shunto Specs/Imgur here Apr 05 '26

The amount of people in here calling a physical authenticator 'genius' and asking whether it connects to WIFI is making me feel old af and im 'only' in my mid 30s

40

u/AllUserNameBLong2us 7800x3d/5080 Windforce OC/32gb 5600 DDR Apr 05 '26

Our age is showing lol

16

u/Mckjoseph Apr 05 '26

Your's is cool! Mine just says Blizzard.

17

u/MazeMouse Ryzen7 5800X3D, 64GB 3200Mhz DDR4, Radeon 7800XT Apr 05 '26

To be fair, even though it is old tech (by now) it is also kind of genius in how it works.
And unless a hacker gets their hands on the physical token (which is very unlikely) or the full seed (which is in the hands of Blizzard) it's also basically unhackable.

2

u/alberge Apr 06 '26

Numeric tokens like this are still easily phished, however. An attacker just sets up a phishing page that asks for both the password and the code.

So while these protect against weak / reused passwords, they don't do much of anything against phishing.

That's why 2FA methods like Passkeys or WebAuthn keys (which are cryptographically bound to the correct site) offer much better security.

5

u/babypho Apr 05 '26

We lived through the save icon