PREVENT THE NEXT CYBERCRIME ATTACK FROM INCLUDING YOU HNWI IN NEW YORK ARE PRIME TARGETS

By Rivka Tadjer

If you have ever had a moving violation in Suffolk County, Long Island from 2013 to now, your driver’s license has been stolen by hackers. In some cases, your passport was stolen too. Before that, 10 million car VIN numbers were stolen, nationwide. Think about everything the DMV, car dealerships, and TSA know about you. That’s all in the hands of hackers. Getting a duplicate title to your car, and then selling it to themselves, is just one type of trouble hackers can cause.

HNWI and the people in their lives are the prime targets now. Our online COVID lives sped up vulnerability, access, and hacker sophistication by years. Any household staff, vendors, and kids of HNWI are easy ways in.

Not a week goes by anymore without news of a breach containing your personal identifying data, which is all hackers need to socially engineer their way into your accounts, your home, your car, your identity, and your family. Equifax, TikTok, American Airlines, Zelle, PayPal, Hilton Honors, the IRS—you see the news and it sounds like a blur of bad.

How do you make your personally identifying stolen data useless to hackers, so even when they get it, they can’t steal from you or impersonate you? You neutralize it. Make that data no longer linked to your accounts, your online life. Here’s how to shrink your personal attack surface:

Get a Personal Cybercrime Victim Report (PCVR), which investigates all the breached personal data that is sitting out there on you and instructs you how to neutralize it. If you have had any symptoms—scam texts, phone calls, emails, this is highly advisable. A PCVR is the blood test of cybercrime. You need to know exactly what has been breached in order to comprehensively slam all your doors shut in hackers’ faces.

Do not store your passwords or even usernames for any online accounts online. No keychain, no “remember me” on app accounts, no password protector programs. The only place to store passwords is on paper. Remember address books? Get one.

Change your username and password, not just your password, for all online accounts. Choose something random like greenchair53! as your username, and something equally random as your password. It must be something that cannot be linked to you.

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Log out when you are not using an app. Don’t stay logged into Facebook permanently. That is literally like leaving your house for the weekend with all the window and doors open, no alarm in place, no cameras.

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Turn off your Bluetooth and AirDrop when you are not using it.

Use your personal hotspot on your phone when you’re at Starbucks, the airport, hotels, or any public place with public wifi. Do not use wifi that is not password protected. Hackers troll public places and with almost no effort get into your phone and your apps via public wifi. Take the sign off your front lawn that tells hackers which home security system is protecting your house. There is no point in security if you tell hackers which system to hack, the instructions for which are also on sale on the Dark Web.

If you use security cameras, hide them, don’t leave them and the connecting wires in plain view.

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Turn off the geolocation apps— Google Map, Find My Phone etc.--when you’re not using them. Cyber intel is used for personal attacks.

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