Something isn't adding up here. The author is excruciatingly rigorous with documenting lots of stuff here, including the screenshots. Then glosses over this bit awfully fast:
> So when he asked me to read back a code — supposedly to prove I was still alive — in a moment of panic, I did
This was an account with authenticator enabled. I'm no expert, but I really don't think there's a recovery process that works as simply as "read back a code". Certainly not in the SMS 2FA sense I'm sure we're all expected to interpret.
Honestly it seems like the author is trying to blame Gmail's UI, when some other more involved phishing technique was actually the novel part here.
> So when he asked me to read back a code — supposedly to prove I was still alive — in a moment of panic, I did
This was an account with authenticator enabled. I'm no expert, but I really don't think there's a recovery process that works as simply as "read back a code". Certainly not in the SMS 2FA sense I'm sure we're all expected to interpret.
Honestly it seems like the author is trying to blame Gmail's UI, when some other more involved phishing technique was actually the novel part here.