This is an update to an article that originally discussed only SMS two-factor authentication. Since then, two things have happened:

• An exploit kit was published allowing a phishing attack to hijack a two-factor secured login.
• Various media declared, “Two-factor has been hacked!”

Unfortunately, these have led some to believe that two-factor authentication is pointless. To quote a reader:  “This makes 2SV quite useless in many cases.”

No. Just … no. That's a seriously mistaken conclusion.

I'm re-visiting this topic yet again because I want to be very clear: two-factor authentication is not useless. In fact, two-factor authentication — SMS-based or otherwise — is significantly more secure than not using two-factor authentication at all.

I'll be honest: I have no answer for your question.

There are many possibilities, the most likely being there is not enough disk space allocated for restore points. In my experience, increasing that may or may not resolve the issue.

System Restore is so difficult to diagnose, and I hear of so many problems and misunderstandings with it, that I now avoid it completely. I turn it off completely. It's not worth it to me.

I'll tell you what I do instead.

These are very legitimate, but unfortunately very tough, questions to answer.

Flash drives do wear out, absolutely.

But exactly when a flash drive will wear out depends on so many things, it's impossible to give a specific answer. All I can say is “It depends.”

I'll give you some guidelines that I'd follow on using a flash drive, were I in your shoes.

A couple of weeks ago, it was announced that LastPass had a bug that could, in certain circumstances, expose a password to a malicious website.

It makes me cringe, but not for the reasons you might think.

And it doesn't have to be LastPass. I'd cringe in the same unexpected way for most of the bugs discovered in any sufficiently mature password vault.

I cringe because of the predicable, unwarranted, over-reaction.