Pick a family safe word tonight.
AI can copy a voice from a short recording. A few seconds from a voicemail, a video, a podcast clip. A call that sounds like your kid, your parent or your boss asking for money is no longer proof of anything.
So tonight, pick a family safe word.
The rules
- One word, or a short phrase, that only your people know.
- Never posted anywhere. Not in a group chat, not in a note on a shared phone.
- If a caller cannot say it, hang up and call back on the number you already have.
That is the whole system. It takes five minutes at dinner and it works against the attack that is growing fastest right now.
Why now
The skill bar for attackers is gone. In one case I wrote about recently, a mediocre attacker got into 600 firewalls across 55 countries in five weeks without a single exploit. No clever code. Just AI doing the patient, repetitive parts that used to need a skilled person.
A cloned voice is the same shift, aimed at families. The attacker does not need to be good. They need a recording, a phone and a story with urgency in it. Your mother in tears. Your son at a police station. A boss who needs a transfer before the bank closes.
What urgency is for
Every one of these calls has a clock in it. The clock is the attack. It is there to stop you doing the one thing that beats it, which is pausing and verifying. A safe word gives you a script for that pause. You do not have to decide whether the voice sounds right. You ask for the word.
Do it for the people who will not read this
The person most likely to get the call is the one least likely to read a post about voice cloning. Older parents. Younger kids. Pick the word with them, tonight, and practise it once. "If you ever get a call from me asking for money, ask me for the word."
The longer version, with the firewall case, is in AI didn't just raise the ceiling, it removed the floor.