Wired
BY ANDY GREENBERG
SECURITYOCT 24, 2023 6:00 AM
AT 9:30 AM on a Wednesday in late September, a hacker who asked to be called Tom Smith sent me a nonsensical text message: “query voltage recurrence.”
Those three words were proof of a remarkable feat—and potentially an extremely valuable one. A few days earlier, I had randomly generated those terms, set them as the passphrase on a certain model of encrypted USB thumb drive known as an IronKey S200, and shipped the drive across the country to Smith and his teammates in the Seattle lab of a startup called Unciphered.