After Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Commissioner Julie Brill got a friend’s “email with an innocuous-looking Google Drive attachment. But after clicking on the link and entering in some of her personal information on the resulting page, she soon realized the truth: This was not a Google site at all.” The March 22, 2016 Washington Post article “What happens when a top privacy and security regulator falls for an email scam” reported that:
Luckily, even though Brill had given out some of that data, she had made sure that the criminals wouldn’t be able to hijack her own accounts. She’d taken advantage of two-factor authentication, a security measure that prevents someone from logging into a website unless they can also reproduce a special code sent to a separate device such as your mobile phone. Two-factor or two-step verification has been adopted by Google, Amazon and other major websites to combat the rise of digital fraud.
During her interview Commission Brill suggested these questions:
‘How many of you have two-factor authentication?’ and I don’t see enough hands,…
So I say to folks, ‘If you get nothing else out of this talk, please go home and turn on two-factor authentication.’
Commission Brill’s email scam confession was released the same day that she announced her resignation from the FTC on March 31, 2016 after 6 years.