The level of persistence these guys went through to phish at scale is astounding—which is how they gained most of their access. They’d otherwise look up API endpoints on GitHub and see if there were any leaked keys (he wasn’t fond of GitHub's automated scanner).
https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/member-notorious-intern...
They themselves are likely to some extent the victims of social engineering as well. After all who benefits from creating exploits for online games and getting children to become script kiddies? Its easier (and probably safer) to make money off of cyber crime if your role isn't committing the crimes yourself. It isn't illegal to create premium software that could in theory be use for crime if you don't market it that way.
To gift to a 529 regardless of the financial institution, you go to some random ugift529.com site and put in a code plus all your financial info. This is considered the gold standard.
To get a payout from a class-action lawsuit that leaked your data, you must go to some other random site (usually some random domain name loosely related to the settlement recently registered by kroll) and enter basically more PII than was leaked in the first place.
To pay your fed taxes with a credit card, you must verify your identity with some 3rd party site, then go to yet another 3rd party site to enter your CC info.
This is insane and forces/trains people to perform actions that in many other scenarios lead to a phishing attack.
Yes, we've (the software industry) been training people to practice poor OpSec for a very long time, so it's not surprising at all that corporate cybersecurity training is largely ineffective. We violate our own rules all the time
Phone/laptop based biometrics?
You really do fully own and control your identity, and if you botch it and lose your top level keys, no one else can give you a "forgot password" recovery.
If this level of unforgiveness were dropped onto everyone overnight, it would mean infinite lost life savings and houses and just mass chaos.
Still I think it would be the better world where that was somehow actually adopted. The responsibility problem would be no problem if was simply the understood norm all along that you have this super important thing and here is how you handle it so you don't lose your house and life savings etc.
If you grew up with this fact of life and so did everyone else, it would be no problem at all. If it had been developed and adopted at the dawn of computers so that you learned this right along with learning what a compuer was in the first place, no problem. It's only a problem now that there are already 8 billion people all using computer-backed services without ever having to worry about anything before.
The real reason it's never gonna happen is exactly because it delivers on the most important promise of end user ultimate agency and actual security.
No company can own it, or own end users use of it. It can not be used for vendor lock in or data collection or profiling or government back doors or censorship or discrimination or any of the things that holding someone's password or the entire auth technology can be used for to have control over users.
No (large) company nor any government has any interest in that, and it's way too technical for 99.99% of people to understand the problems with all the other popular auth systems so there will be no overwhelming popular uprising forcing the issue, and so it will never happen.
A method already exists (I think), that solves the hard problems and delivers the thing everyone says they want, and everything else claims to be groping for, but we will never get to use it.