Digital Identity Hardening: A Household Checklist

Why this matters more with AI in the picture

AI has made the cheap, high-volume side of identity attacks — phishing, credential-stuffing, and impersonation — both more convincing and easier to run at scale. Hardening steps that were “nice to have” in 2018 are closer to essential now.

The checklist

• Hardware security keys (FIDO2/passkeys) on every account that supports them. SMS-based two-factor authentication is meaningfully weaker against AI-assisted social engineering and SIM-swap attacks.
• A password manager with unique passwords per account — credential reuse is still the single most exploited weakness, AI or not.
• Locked-down social media privacy settings, specifically removing publicly visible birthdays, addresses, phone numbers, and family member names — exactly the data scammers use to make an AI-assisted impersonation attempt convincing.
• A documented family verification protocol for any request — call, video, or email — involving money, credentials, or urgent action (see Deepfake and Voice-Clone Defense for the specific “safe word” method).
• Regular credit freezes or monitoring for family members, especially children and elderly relatives, whose identity theft often goes undetected far longer.
• Data-broker opt-outs where available — the same personal data brokers aggregate for marketing is what attackers use to build a convincing profile of your family.

The single highest-leverage step

If you do only one thing: move every account you can to a hardware security key or passkey. It removes an entire category of AI-assisted phishing from being viable, regardless of how convincing the message is.