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Leadership Land's avatar

Timely, informative, and engaging. Thanks so much for writing this.

Good to know my natural paranoia wasn't off-base.

I'm a big fan of family safe words. Some notes to share:

1. Creating a safeword (or security phrase) isn't enough. You have to rehearse them at least quarterly, or they'll be forgotten. Especially by those who treat security and trust blithely (which is most people who haven't been victimized).

2. Failing to remember a safeword is okay if you ask a security question in real time. "What was street address of the house back in New York?" The attacker would need a dossier on you to know that the correct answer is "we've never lived in New York."

Security questions suck for login purposes, but will probably work for identity verification in real time.

3. If you're going through the trouble of setting up safewords, you might as well set up a duress code while you're at it. Just in case you're ACTUALLY in a car accident and the other driver is threatening you with a gun. "I'm doing fine, mom. I'm just watching a pack of angry raccoons fighting in the backyard, that's all."

Mark S. Carroll ✅'s avatar

This is the kind of post I wish more people would write: mechanisms, not vibes. You are not selling panic, but you are also not selling “we’ll patch it and move on.”

Three points for the win!

First, the family safe word. That is an actual control. Low tech, high leverage, and it breaks the scam’s whole economic model. Callback on a known number plus one absurd phrase beats a thousand “be vigilant” posters.

Second, agentic browsers. The uncomfortable truth is the browser security model assumes page content is untrusted, then we bolt on an agent that treats page content like instructions. That is not a bug. That is a category error. If someone is logged into email or banking and asks “summarize this,” they are one hidden prompt away from turning their session cookies into a remote control.

Third, the identity angle hiding inside the voice clone section. These attacks do not win on technology. They win on urgency and trust. That is why an analog authentication step works so well.

If anyone reading this wants a one sentence policy, here it is. Treat agentic browsers like a hazardous material. Separate machine or separate profile, no real logins, no auto actions. And for families, set the safe word now, before you need it.

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