It’s been a while but recently something happened to a friend / neighbour that inspired this blog.
It was a Saturday afternoon when I saw my neighbour fumbling and frustrated with his cell phone. Being the friendly techie neighbour, I went over to see if I could help. He showed me his phone and where you’d usually see the mobile carrier signal (those bars we want to see on the right side) it said “SOS” and he couldn’t make any calls.
Being the troubleshooter, I restarted his phone, that didn’t help, I then did a soft reset (no data loss) and that did nothing. Without wanting to get to invasive, I suggested he immediately go the nearest carrier retail store and ask for a new SIM card. Off he went hopeful that would be the fix.
Around 6:00 PM my doorbell rings and there stood my neighbour in a panic! He told me he went to the carrier’s store and it was not a defective SIM card. His mobile account was locked out and he couldn’t get it back, he got hacked!!!! The account was stolen and he was unable to get it unlocked the hacker had total control, he would have to contact their fraud department to regain control over his own account and both his and his wife’s phones. And of course being the weekend he was unable to reach the fraud department.
He asked me how it could have happened knowing my cybersecurity knowledge. I asked him if he clicked on a link in an email or text that day. That’s when it all came together, he had purchased through a streaming service a special soccer match he wanted to watch and was sent a link to click. The problem was that he had so many unread text messages he clicked the wrong link and in a split second he was hit by a hacker. He was breached with one simple click and nothing he could do would change that! It took 1 second and he lost control of his precious account and more.
It get’s worse, I told him to immediately check his credit cards and bank accounts. The hacker had made charges on his credit cards, and here’s the big one, the hacker transferred $10,000.00 from his bank account through a well known money transfer company. He was devastated to say the least, to make matters worse he had no way to make any calls to try and get mobile his accounts back or contact his bank or credit card companies.
After a few days we spoke and he had been fully restored thank goodness, the bank put the funds back in his account, the credit card companies reversed the charges, and he had control of his mobile account back.
This is when we spoke after everything was back in his control and his money was returned that I had the talk about MFA / 2FA on EVERYTHING, I didn’t want to make him feel worse during the most stressful time! Most of us don’t realize just how fast we can get hit by something just because we did something without thinking, if this lesson didn’t teach him to lock down every account from financial to social media, nothing will.
I have written blogs about hacking, multi factor authentication (MFA/2FA), just about all the ways we need to secure ourselves in this crazy time we live in know. But this hit close to home and my heart broke for my friend as he was lost and didn’t have any way to understand how fast he could lose so much.
There are times of the year where hackers are more active with attacks whether phishing emails or text messages, tax season is one of them, the holidays are another, but it’s not only then that they’re active it’s always, so before you click on anything make 100% sure you know what it is and you know who it’s coming from, and never hesitate to call and check with who you think the message came from, that call could save you a lot of aggrevation and money!
