The right thing to do is to calmly ask one of the administrators on your Google account to: Now, there’s a simple way to handle this, but we didn’t think of it until afterward. I was prompted for my password, which was in LastPass, which required Google Authenticator, which was on my phone. I went into Gmail, clicked on My Account and selected "Sign In and Security," which is what you want if you’ve set up your Android device properly. Use software to try to locate your device
Phew, I still had access to Slack, Gmail, and Apple Messages on my laptop. I burned a United Club pass and used my laptop to get online. ‘ You would lose your head if it wasn’t attached to your body!’” Fortunately, I was saved any such embarrassment due to the fact that I'D LOST MY PHONE and couldn’t call anyone. “No, not my iPad, that was last week…Yes, seriously. Finally, my mind regaled me with a preview of the embarrassment I would surely experience when I explained to my wife that I had lost another device. Then my mind helpfully suggested that, having lost two devices in the space of a week, I likely had an aggressive form of dementia. Failing that, they could just place the phone in a Faraday cage while working to decrypt the device. My mind instantly leaped to an image of sophisticated cyber-thieves viewing the falafel stains on the glass to derive the pattern that I used. Luckily, my phone was locked and would require either knowing the lock-screen pattern or cutting off my thumb. The last time I clearly remembered using my phone was when I’d ordered the Uber at the hotel and after that, I wasn’t sure. It can be difficult to relax and mentally retrace your steps, but that’s key. I’d left it in departures and it hadn’t yet been found,.Someone had grabbed my phone out of a TSA tray,.After coming up short with the TSA agent, I had the United customer service representative call the departures check-in area, which also yielded nothing. After three deep breaths and an extra-large strawberry parfait to take the edge off, I retraced my steps to TSA. I had just passed through the TSA checkpoint at the airport, put clothes back on, admired the renovations, and walked up the stairs into the gate area when I realized that I didn’t have it with me. The Android device was my primary phone and 2FA device. I was able to find my iPad at the Lost & Found at my local airport with a simple phone call. I recently managed to lose both an iOS and an Android device within the space of a week. Losing your phone or tablet can be incredibly stressful, but even more so if it’s your 2FA device-that something you need to have in order to access all the things. I've provided links to the iOS equivalents of the Android tools that I use below.
I'll describe how I handled that situation and leave it to the reader to use this information to figure out the corresponding steps for their own device or password manager. In my case, I had an Android phone and stored my passwords using LastPass. But what happens if you don't have it? Like that time I left my phone somewhere between the hotel and LAX security. Now, you're heavily reliant on something you have. The only password you need to remember is a single, master one to access your password store. No problem, you store these passwords in a password management app like LastPass or 1Password and it does the remembering for you. Now if you're a tricksy-little hobbit you probably use long, unique passwords for every application and those passwords aren't necessarily easy to remember. To access Gmail, you need to have your username and password (something you know) and a machine-generated temporary token from an app like Google Authenticator (something you have) or a text. To use a common example, let’s say you've properly set up 2FA on your Gmail account. These can be something you have (like an ATM card), something you know (like a PIN), or something you are, called "inherence," such as a fingerprint or retina scan. Two-factor authentication, or '2FA' for short, comes from the computer science concept of multi-factor authentication which requires that a would-be user must present at least two separate pieces of evidence to prove they are who they claim to be. If you're following best practices for securing your personal devices and cloud accounts, you’ve likely enabled two-factor authentication.