I tried Authy’s “Forgot your password?” option. That, in the postwar generation’s jargon, was a Catch-22. So now it seemed that I needed the Authy backup password that I had saved in LastPass, if I wanted to log into Authy and I needed Authy to produce the 2FA code required to log into LastPass. I suspected I had saved it in LastPass, because there was no note of it anywhere else, and it was not something I would have left just lying around. Normally, I would save a record of a password. Unfortunately, I had no record of any Authy backup password. That was the first time it had done that. Click on any account to decrypt it.” Naturally, I chose LastPass. That screen said, “All your accounts are encrypted. That worked: it put me through to the Authy screen. I hit the phone’s Back button and tried the next option: SMS message. (This was the first of several points at which my security plan lacked alternatives that might have resolved the situation.) So that didn’t seem to work. I didn’t have Authy installed anywhere else. But there didn’t seem to be any way, there, of approving the phone. That was easy: I already had the Authy app open on my Windows 10 desktop computer. Open the Authy app on any of your other devices to approve this device. I chose “Use existing device.” It said this: When I restored that app to the phone, it asked for a way to verify my account. I think the first thing that went wrong was that I couldn’t use Authy. Getting it back up to speed shouldn’t have been a big deal. There are stories of real ordeals, where people make huge efforts to seek or replace the lost or stolen phones that they have built their lives around. I only really use it for calls, the occasional message, and Authy. Let me hasten to say that I am not a person who lives and dies by his phone. It would be safe to say that there have been consequences I did not anticipate. I am not sure where the bad news first began to hit. That’s where the pessimistic side of the story began. A reset, I believed, would clear all that out. It seemed to be using a lot of storage space for no clear reason. It was using a lot of battery, probably due to apps I didn’t need. I’d had the phone for 18 months and had never done a reset. But a reset still seemed like a good idea. There may have been a setting, somewhere deep within the phone, that would have solved that problem. It looked like the phone was malfunctioning. Someone would call, and there seemed to be no way to pick it up. It seemed simple enough: the phone wasn’t letting me answer phone calls. In this case, the first thing that went wrong was that I did a factory reset on my phone. The question now was, would LastPass and Authy be part of the solution, or part of the problem? Much of what went wrong was my own fault. Then there is the pessimistic half, where something goes wrong. That is the optimistic half of the story. Not super-simple, but not bad a person could catch on to it soon enough. To use LastPass, you need a code from the authenticator, and Authy provides that. You enter your passwords, and LastPass manages them. So when I chose LastPass and Authy, I seemed to be choosing wisely. They say, and I believe, that it’s a good idea to use a password manager and they say, and again I believe, that LastPass is one of the better ones. And they also say Authy is the best, or at least one of the best, two-factor (2FA) or multifactor authentication (MFA) tools available.
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