Your Phone Was Stolen. Now What?
Adaeze walks through the first thirty minutes after a phone theft on a Lagos bus, the order to do things in, and the settings that make a stolen phone nearly worthless.
The WhatsApp Takeover, Step by Step
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Show notes
How a six-digit code steals an account
Ngozi, a tailor in Enugu, got a message from a friend asking for a code that had arrived by mistake. Within minutes, her friends were being asked for money in her name. Adaeze reconstructs the whole attack with Ngozi on the line and explains why it keeps working.
- Why the code arrived at all, and what the attacker had already done
- The social trick that makes people hand it over
- Turning on the two-step PIN in under two minutes
- How to recover an account that is already gone
One Setting this week: the WhatsApp two-step PIN. Do it before the next episode.
Transcript
Hi, I am Adaeze Nwankwo and this is Two Factor Everything, the show where we make your online life a lot harder to break into without making you learn a single acronym. Today's story comes from Ngozi, a tailor in Enugu, who got a WhatsApp message from a friend saying, sorry, I sent you a code by mistake, can you forward it? She did. Ten minutes later her friends were being asked for urgent money in her name. Ngozi is on the line with me and we are going to walk through exactly what happened, message by message, and then I am going to show you the one setting that would have stopped it cold. It takes two minutes. If you do nothing else this fortnight, do that. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Let's go!
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