Ordinary almost always. The exception is specific enough to describe, and it is the moment this whole book exists for.
- What it literally says
- That you need to sign in again.
- What it actually means
- Usually that a session timed out, which happens routinely and often faster here than on ordinary sites.
- What it does not mean
- That the prompt in front of you belongs to the market. A re-login prompt is the single most valuable thing to imitate, because it asks for exactly what somebody wants.
- What to do
- Check the signature before typing, not after. Checking afterwards tells you what happened rather than preventing it.
- If it looks different
- An unexpected prompt mid session, particularly during an outage, is the pattern worth stopping at rather than complying with.
Why this prompt specifically
Everything somebody wants is entered on that one screen, which makes it the highest value thing to copy. And people have been trained by ordinary websites to treat a re-login as a mild annoyance to be clicked through rather than a decision.
The combination is why a copied login page is the most common attack in this subject and also the least sophisticated. It does not need to be clever. It needs to appear at a moment when typing a password feels routine.
The habits that cover it
- Verify before typing. Every time, including the times it feels unnecessary, which is most of them.
- Never enter credentials on a page you arrived at from a link somebody sent. Navigate there yourself from an address you established.
- Do not let a password manager fill on an address you have not checked. Convenience there removes the pause where you would have noticed.
- Never enter a wallet phrase anywhere. No legitimate flow asks for one, and there is no exception.
If you already typed
Change the password from a session you established through an address you checked yourself, then reset the second factor, then read the message log before looking at the balance. That ordering is deliberate: the account is what somebody can act through right now, including talking to other people as you.