The scam that gets you to do the hacking yourself
Plus a router that senses you walk by, iPhones too locked to steal, and a five-minute Wi-Fi trick.
The standout this week is a scam you run on yourself. The newest fake CAPTCHA does not ask you to find the traffic lights. It asks you to paste a command that infects your own machine, and it works because it looks like the box you click without thinking. After that the issue ranges wide: a router that can sense you move through a room, stolen iPhones turning into paperweights, and the UK deciding who has to prove their age online. The tip is the fun one for once, a Wi-Fi trick you will use at your next dinner party. If you only have a minute, read the CAPTCHA one.
The fake CAPTCHA scam you run yourself
The newest version does not ask you to find traffic lights. It asks you to press a couple of keys and paste something to "verify you are human." The thing you paste is malware, and you installed it by hand. If a checkbox ever sends you to your keyboard, stop.
News
Your Wi-Fi Router Can Track Movement in Your Home
Newer routers can read the dips in their own signal to tell when someone moves through a room. It is a real, shipping feature sold as home security, and for now it senses motion, not who you are. Good to know what your own hardware can already do before the marketing explains it to you.
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Stolen iPhones are becoming worthless to thieves
A stolen iPhone is becoming an expensive paperweight for whoever grabs it, now that the locks survive a factory reset. The piece has the one setting to confirm is on.
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How the UK plans to keep teens off social media (and what it means for adults)
The UK wants platforms to check ages, which means more of us proving we are adults to use ordinary sites. The piece covers what that looks like and why the burden lands on everyone, not just kids under 16.
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5-Minute Tech Tip: Share your Wi-Fi without ever spelling out the password
Your phone can turn your home network into a QR code that any guest scans with a camera, iPhone or Android. No more reading "capital R, lowercase q, was that a zero" off the back of the router. Five minutes, once.
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Scary Headline of the Week
The headline: "24 billion passwords leaked." (Some outlets say 16 billion. Same genre.) It reads like every account you own fell out the door at once.
What happened: researchers at Cybernews found a giant pile of login records compiled from old breaches and from malware that scrapes saved passwords off infected machines. There was no new break-in at Apple, Google, or your bank, and it was pulled offline within days. Nobody could even count the duplicates.
What to do: skip the panic of changing every password you own. Check your email at haveibeenpwned.com, change anything you reused, and let a password manager carry the rest. The durable answer is to stop having a password that can be stolen at all, which is the point of passkeys, and to turn on MFA anywhere passkeys are not an option yet.
If you only read one: the CAPTCHA scam. It is the one you could fall for between now and next Tuesday.
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Reply and tell me which of these sent you to go change a setting.
Joel
