As an ambulance whisked Jon Hansen to the hospital last year, he held tightly to his wife’s hand and told her things she needed to know if he were to die.
“Write down this password,” he told her. “Oh, you’ll need this one too. And you don’t have this one either.”
The software salesman from Orem, Utah, managed to recover from that bout with encephalitis.
But the ambulance ride taught him a valuable lesson.
“One of the first things I did was write down all my passwords and put them in the safe,” he said. “I should have done that a long time ago.”
Perhaps there are secrets we all should take to the grave. But, as Hansen and others have learned, computer account passwords are not among them.
As an increasing amount of critical personal and work-related information is stored on computers instead of inside file cabinets, passwords are creating locked doors for lawyers, will executors and the survivors of deceased loved ones. Without a comprehensive list of passwords, survivors often are forced to hire special password-cracking services to break through electronic barriers.
The lack of access to password-protected online bank and brokerage accounts, as well as electronic mail and sections of computer hard drives, has prolonged the settlement of estates.
“It’s becoming a very common occurrence,” said John E. Kuslich, a for-hire password cracker and developer of break-in software. “I’ve had families of people who have committed suicide, for example, and they’ll call me and say all these files are encrypted, and they want to get into them. In those cases, especially, people call back and are so thankful for what they were able to read. It’s really something else.”
Although there are a variety of ways to retrieve a dead person’s passwords, there are legal issues to consider.
Matt Yarbrough, a former federal prosecutor and head of Fish & Richardson’s Cyber Law Group, said survivors risk violating state and federal statutes if they’re not careful.
“Most estate cases are as nasty as divorce or worse,” Yarbrough said. “You can really run afoul of the law if you don’t have the authority.”
Estate planners recommend that people make complete lists of their passwords and online accounts and store them with their wills.
There’s a new e-mail service designed to send notes–love messages, lists of computer passwords or any other important information–to survivors in the event of someone’s sudden demise. MyLastEmail, which began service in November, (www.mylastemail.com) charges users $9.99 for a three-year subscription for postmortem delivery of farewell e-mails.
When a MyLastEmail certificate is left behind by the deceased, survivors mail it to the company, which then begins the delivery of stored e-mail.
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As one writer put it, “With MyLastEmail.com, you can communicate long after you’ve logged off.”