It depends. If everything is stored unencrypted on the drive it's pretty easy to reset passwords or boot to a USB and access everything. If it's locked down hard you could be SOL. The worst I've seen happen is the loss of family photos with people who had passed away so they were irreplaceable.
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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It would be such a mindfuck honestly. Like all your billing, auth, files, apps, gone. Like I feel like its plausible you could literally end up on the street
Heh, banks are absolute shit at the soft entry points, like calling up with minimal personal information and a teller opening the door wide for you.
There was another person in my hometown with the same name and we used the same bank. They gave her access to my account multiple times. I had long passwords and an account flag reminding the tellers to confirm Date of Birth EVERY TIME. They still let her withdraw several hundred dollars from my account (not that she was trying to to steal my money, just that she requested a withdrawal and they didn't confirm the right account). Account closed, bank reported, and I am 100% sure they would make the same fuckup today if I gave them the opportunity.
You would be terrified how easy it can be to get access to accounts without a password or even ID.
Probably not. It might be a pain in the ass but realistically you'll be able to work with banks/utilities/work to get access back. As long as you have access to your email as well you can likely recover your accounts. Files are likely the biggest risk, remember to keep regular backups and even this can be recovered.
This is why you should keep backups, which, for me, includes physical printouts of access data stored in a safe location. That's also helpful if something should happen to you.
It’s largely dependent on the hardware and software.
For example, old ass iPod Touches/iPhones can be brute forced with special hardware. I watched a video on this recently of some guy who found his old iPhone and wanted pictures off of it and the tech had a machine that would take a few days to guess every possible passcode combination. Though he was able to set a certain possible combination which helped decrease the amount of time to a few days.
That type of brute force is not as possible on modern hardware and software because manufacturers and programmers have gotten wise to it and developed better measures to protect against it, such as timeouts for incorrect passcodes. A few decades ago when we didn’t have this, it would still take a machine a few days to crack the code using brute force, but now you’ve added even more time on top of that to further slow the process, in hopes of the machine malfunctioning or just someone not wanting to waste time doing that.