First Message

"Alright, let's start by finding a forum. Something popular. The more traffic, the better. "

After some time, we settled on Yahoo Finance.

"You need a clean email. Something disposable. We'll use a five-minute email service."

He navigated to a temporary email site, grabbed a random email, and entered it into the Yahoo form. "Now for the username," he said, pausing. "We'll use an acronym—'MK.'"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Those are popular first letters of names and surnames in Slavic countries. Nothing specific, really. That's the point. It's generic, common, and forgettable. Exactly what you want."

"And," he added, his voice lowering a bit, "you're going to need a secure way to store the password. You don't want to rely on traditional password managers. Too easy to get hacked. I've got a better method. You're going to store your password in an image."

"What?" I blinked.