Eons ago, in 2012, I had a weird experience. My iPhone suddenly shut down. When I restarted it, I found it was totally reset—clean, like a new device. This was the early days of iOS, so I wasn’t too concerned until I went to connect it to my computer to restore it from a backup. But when I flipped open the lid of my laptop, it too was mid-restart. And then, suddenly, the screen went gray. It was being remotely wiped. I turned on my iPad. It, too, had been wiped. I was being hacked.  Frantically, I shut down all my devices, unplugged everything connected to the internet in my house, turned off my router, and went next door to use my neighbors’ computer and find out what was going on. Deepening my panic, I realized hackers had also gained control of, and nuked, my Google account. Worse, they were in control of my Twitter, which they were gleefully using to spew all sorts of vile comments. It was nasty.  You have to remember, this was before all of us lived with a constant rain of text messages and emails designed to elicit the information necessary to pull something like this off. These crooks hadn’t brute-forced their way in, or used any sort of sophisticated techniques to gain access to my accounts. Instead, they had relied on publicly available information, and a fake credit card number, to socially engineer their way into my Amazon account, where they looked up the last four digits of my real credit card number. Then they used that information to get into Apple. And because that account was linked to my Gmail, and that to my Twitter, it gave them the keys to everything. But what really troubled me was what I learned as I followed up on my hack over the ensuing weeks and months: This kind of thing was, while still novel, becoming more common. Some version of what happened to me had happened to lots of other people. The kids who were responsible—it was a couple of kids—weren’t criminal masterminds. They had just found a gap, a place where a technology was now common