There’s a lesson to heed from the National Security Agency’s recent success in using Claude’s Mythos model to surface vulnerabilities in its own systems in hours.

The lesson isn’t that you should bury gold bars in your backyard as a hedge against an AI attack which topples the Federal Reserve System.

No, the key lesson here is that, even though AI models as powerful as Mythos may be available to bad actors soon, you can take steps right now to ensure you always have access to your most important digital accounts.

It’s a hard question to ask: If you were locked out of your most important account today, could you get back in?

Do you know?

How I Solved The Riddle

Bitwarden’s Emergency Access is my answer.

My most important account is my password manager, Bitwarden. If I got locked out of Bitwarden, I would lose access to every one of my accounts.

Banking. Email. Work. Everything. All gone.

Because of that, I’ve ensured I never permanently lose access to Bitwarden by setting up Emergency Access. I designated a trusted contact and set a few business rules to govern how that person can gain access to all my information.

But what if you don’t use a password manager? What if that’s one of the things you’re going to get to some day?

Your Simple Solution

Let’s assume you don’t use a password manager. How should you prepare against losing access to your accounts?

Close your eyes right now and think about the last few times you needed to access your bank account, life insurance, retirement account or possibly a work login?

Think about the steps you needed to complete to sign in to those accounts. See them in your head as clearly as you can.

Odds are you received a temporary code either as a text message or as an email. And I’d bet, because you don’t use a password manager, you may have needed to reset your password by sending a request to your email account.

That makes email your single point of failure and the one you need to protect today.

With paper.

How to Maintain Access

Paper?

Yes. Surprise, but paper is your friend for maintaining access to your online accounts.

Both Gmail and Apple Mail — two of the most-used consumer email providers on the planet — provide a way for a user to ensure they can regain access if they’re locked out. To take advantage of them, though, you have to prepare ahead of time.

Gmail provides a set of eight-digit Backup Codes. Each one of the codes can be used exactly once to bypass Gmail’s typical two-factor authentication login system.

Apple allows a user to set up a 28-character Recovery Key. It’s the only way to get back into your Apple account if you lose your trusted Apple device and forget your password.

Be sure to read the instructions before setting up an Apple Recovery Key. As it says, “If you can’t provide your recovery key, you’ll be locked out of your account permanently.”

Whichever one you use for email, once you establish your codes or key, print them. And then store that paper with your other important documents somewhere secure like in a fireproof, waterproof safe.

Either do this right now or block one hour on your calendar for next Saturday or Sunday morning.

Print the codes. Purchase the safe. Protect what is most valuable.

And when you are ready to stop managing paper, here’s the upgrade: work with me to set up a password manager. In as little as 90 minutes, you’ll be prepared for whatever the bad actors, or your fallible human memory, can do to your online access.