Summary: Hackers send grandmother phishing mail. Grandmother enter her email address and password. Hackers go into house of Grandmother. Hackers change settings on router and and television of grandmother.
They actually didn't even do the whole thing themselves. Instead hired a phishing service...
To me this is more similar to people dressed as UPS truck drivers going inside an apartment and stealing keys. Or a cashier taking a picture of a customer's credit card.
P.S. Excellent bot if it is a bot. It seems to be taking sides on an issue and not just summarizing, which I haven't seen happen previously with any other summary bots.
They didn't 'hire a phishing service'. They used a website.
Social engineering is often a very efficient alternative to rainbow tables, wiretapping, buffer overruns and other technical exploits.
Physically breaking in is a real threat. Now break-ins risk digital breaches as well as the old standards. Just because it involves being onsite doesn't mean it isn't a meaningful threat, and now it's not limited to just the artifacts that are stolen.
In fact, "standard" protocol in response to a physical home breakin should probably include a digital "audit."
I'm just disappointed that the article was about "hackers" but just talked about scams most of us are already aware of; seems kind of click-baity. They could have entitled the article "Here's One Easy Trick to Protect Yourself from Identity Theft."
be pretty cool if it was the former. that would be some serious natural language processing. (not that i know anything about that subject)
i read the article, this post does seem like a pretty accurate summary.