Scammers are out of control. At the start of December, the FBI issued a recommendation that people create a “secret word or phrase with your family to verify their identity,” and British bank Starling has also published guidelines on creating safe phrases with others. “Having a passphrase or similarly prepared strategy enables victims to quickly validate legitimacy of an unusual …
At 9:30 am on a Wednesday in late September, a hacker who asked to be called Tom Smith sent me a nonsensical text message: “query voltage recurrence.” Those three words were proof of a remarkable feat—and potentially an extremely valuable one. A few days earlier, I had randomly generated those terms, set them as the passphrase on a certain model …
