[Phillip Beall]

All,

Most of you know some of my background, airline pilot with a law enforcement/security component, so you will understand my interest when I received the link to a Time piece titled How a Stranger Used One Text Message to Steal My Entire Digital Life from a retired American pilot friend.  He and I go back decades and served in the highest leadership positions with the pilot union at AA.  We have parallel shared interests in technology, security, etc., and a really strong trust relationship.  So, when I get a note from him I stop what I am doing to look at it.  What I read horrified me and I literally stopped everything for 30-60 minutes yesterday morning.  I first read the article, then I took notes and reviewed Kathy and my security posture and then I built a bit of a plan.

To start with, I believe we were already better prepared than Mr. Petit was.  Like me, he had friends in private security and with the FBI.  Perhaps unlike me, I detected no long-standing law enforcement participation.  Being involved in law enforcement will give the thinking person a sobering opportunity to hopefully learn from the mistakes of others.  Kathy and I long ago started using a password manager (RoboForm), froze our credit reports and signed up for the top-tier plan with Norton LifeLock.  If you are reading this and you haven’t taken similar steps you may be extremely vulnerable to the same sort of exploits as plagued the unfortunate Petit in the article.

Rather than write a treatise here I suggest that you go and read the piece How a Stranger Used One Text Message to Steal My Entire Digital Life (link here) and get ready to have your mind blown.  Then, please get serious about not just yourself, but your elderly parents and/or siblings and anyone else you have any connection to helping with matters of personal finance and security.

Some of you will recall that a few years ago I had the near death experience of my dad getting his system hacked and because I figured out what was happening and I was his email administrator, I was able to jump ahead of the hackers and thwart them.  Thank God it only cost me about a week of my life and my parent’s did not lose any money.  If you don’t recall the post it was Safe Computing – My Horrifying Experience (link here).  I have known some pretty hard people in my life, but none like the guy in The Beekeeper (link here).  I wish I could turn a guy like that loose on these people, but the bottom line?  You absolutely must be proactive or the consequences are so severe as to be potentially life altering.  In fact, here is an up close and personal story for you.  The year before last one of my parent’s best friends was similarly hacked and before it was over the bad guys drained $250,000 out of their accounts.  Retired and in their 80’s this former Plano firefighter and his wife didn’t have $250k to lose, so it seriously altered their retirement plans.  And my friends, I do not want any of you to similarly fall victim to these cretins, so please take heed.

At the absolute minimum:

• Use a password manager.  We use RoboForm, it isn’t as famous as some but it is easy to use and robust. ($30 per year to be on every device you own.)
• Freeze your credit bureau files. (free)
• Never, ever, reuse a password between sites. (free)
• Have an email address you can use for password recovery that has nothing to do with anything else in your life.  It doesn’t have to be yours, it can be the email address of a super-trusted friend. (free)

If you want to know more please let me know and I will either chat with you one-on-one or write some additional material and add it to this post.

73

Phillip Beall (W5EBC)

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