Welcome to the podcast my business.com.au and today we have Terence From https://isecurityguru.com/ How are You Terence?
Terence
Hey, good. How are you?
Tony skinner
Today we are covering how victms of violence especially from ex partners can protect themselves.
So what, what led you into doing these sort of tips and information for domestic violence survivors?
Yeah, because someone told me, I mean, talk to me about it. And It just occurred to me that, you know, domestic violence survivors are especially vulnerable to identity theft. And the reason is because the the ex partner knows a lot about you, your ex partner knows a lot about you. And they knows and that gives them a really good head start on committing identity theft, identity theft. So I realized that this is the problem, and that needs to be addressed. Because, um, you know, it’s not easy. Sometimes it can be a life and death matters, you know. So I think that’s important thing to talk about, you know?
Okay, so today, what we’re talking about is something specific. We’re doing a bit of a series on social justice and social issues and what happens. And today we’re talking about how survivors of domestic violence that’s both male and female, can protect themselves. Because let’s face it, we have so many devices with so many things. And then so many paths with so much everything. It’s easy not to remember what you have to do to stop being tracked and followed up by your previous partner.
Terence
Yeah, there’s lots of things to do, actually. But it can be done. Yeah, you got to be systematic and methodical. about that. Hmm.
Tony skinner
So talking about that. So the first one is change all your passwords at once. How do you do that?
Um, the first the very important thing is to get a password manager. Because the human brain is not going to be able to remember all the passwords to the proper passwords is you have to make sure that all your passwords unique, because if they’re not, and if the ex partner guess one of them that they will be the guess the rest and, and create a lot of havoc. So a password manager is good in the sense that it helps you remember makes all your pases unique. And only that all possible managers have a feature to generate random password, totally random and guessable password. And today, you know, we’ve hackers able to get like a trillion password a second with, you know, advanced GPU, you know, equipment under 10, grand, you know, passwords that you a human brain can remember is not safe anymore. So you need to have a complete random machine generated password. So in other words, you have to use a machine to fight against machines.
Tony skinner
So and they that sorry, yeah. So what that leads to as well is that normally, when you change a password, it asks you to answer secret questions. And of course, your ex partner knows all your questions, and all the answers to questions like what school you went to the name of your first pet, all those sort of questions you normally get out. Yeah.
Terence
Yeah. So so. So you might have to do an audit of account. Because what happened is that some some accounts have a fallback system, where if you let’s say you forget a password, and say, okay, you forget a password status, answer some answers some to some questions on secret, you know, answers, like, what’s your pet’s name? You know, what’s your first school who’s a favorite teacher and cancel? Your ex partner might know the answers to all of them, because you’re in a close relationship with him or her. So you have to go to all these accounts secret answers, and you know, change all of them or disable them or do something about it. So this one thing you have to watch out for.
Tony skinner
Fantastic, okay. And then of course, again, while we’re talking about passwords, really important to turn on two step verification. And we’ve spoken about this before. And one of the best ones is Google password, because it sends out a new password for verification, like every minute or something changes, doesn’t it?
Terence
Yeah. That’s right. So what we just mentioned is an app called Google Authenticator. There are a lot of complicated apps out in the market, but the idea is, this automatically generates a random six digit number every 30 seconds. And after you enter the password, you have to enter that random six digit PIN along with any of the pins doesn’t match, it doesn’t allow you to so it’s a second step to protect your account. So in case ex partner gets your password or know what the password is, if they don’t have the automatic data, they cannot get in and some some systems Use an SMS instead of the collocated app, and I don’t recommend SMS because it can be, you know, there’s a lot of mobile polling scam. And a partner who knows a lot about you can put your phone number the way and steal the six digit SMS code.
Tony skinner
So it’s getting it was interesting you say that because you’ve got it in here below to any text messages to ask you permission to put your phone number to another telco provider.
Terence
Yeah. So if you receive such a message out of the blue, you have to respond as soon as possible. The telco provider usually give you a warning of let’s say, 15 minutes to an hour, a limited time of time, a limited period of time. So if don’t respond to it, the number will be ported away. So so you see such a message, take action, you know, reply to it, say no ring, up the telco providers, do something about it. stop it from happening.
Tony skinner
I saw a show where I was showing how easy it was to do this. And they were at a Las Vegas conference. And she phoned up actually, like, she’s the wife of the person. And you know, she’s putting on, you know, pretending to be the wife and going, Oh, look, geez, I need to get in quickly had a baby sound on her phone, so they could hear the baby, create urgency or whatever. So people are very, very smart on that. Another thing that you’re talking about what we’re talking about mobile devices and smart devices, is turnoff like location?
Terence
Yes, that’s right. Because if your location services on whatever photos you have, by default, it will have the your location, your physical location, and based on the photo, so if you, you know, post the photo in social media or send it to WhatsApp, whatever, then that will give away your physical location. And for some domestic violence, survivors, victims, that is really dangerous information to leak out, because the xpander might know where you live and go after you. So turn that off. That’s really important.
Tony skinner
Yeah, absolutely. And of course, you’ve got old computers and so forth. But we’ll get to that one better. Another one here about after you change your address asked for a re issue of your driver’s license with a new number.
Terence
Yes, that’s important, because a lot of services today you have like even applying for a SIM card, you know, they asked for your identity. And one of that identity is your driver’s license. So you to give your date of birth, driver’s license number, and the address, and name. And if and I can, we can safely say that your ex partner probably know your name, definitely know your name, definitely know what a date of birth is, and know where you used to leave. And he might even know your he or she might even know your your driver’s license number, this piece of information, they can mess, they can steal, anybody can steal your identity. And so when you change your address, you know, get an issue of driver’s license, get a new number. And that will make it much harder for someone to steal your identity.
Tony skinner
Absolutely. And when we’re talking about computers and devices, we all have Microsoft and Google and Apple accounts and blah, blah, blah, and all those sort of things. You’re not getting new ones. Yes. Get rid of the old, don’t, they don’t even mess about get rid of the old ones. get new ones. And make sure it’s not shared with your ex partner and double check that because sometimes, these sort of services want you to do things their way because I want to connect you with the information they’ve got around you. They don’t want to give you something new
Terence
and clean this right so that happened to one someone I knew. She said you know her ex partner, she told me her ex partner can receive all her messages and email. And the first thing I’ve done okay, is the phone hack is that jailbroken a lot then I look at it Oh okay. The reason is because the apple id does she register her iPhone with these a shared Apple ID that both her and ex partner use the same Apple ID so whatever messages that she receive on a phone that ex partner also received. So when you when you get home, when you have your phone do a wipe and re register the new Apple ID or Google ID or Microsoft ID. So this is ensure that you know the account belongs to you only and none of your cloud storage messages you know get gets you know shared with your ex partner. So this is one thing you need to do. Right okay,
Tony skinner
so you do A lot of different things.
Tony skinner
Yeah, absolutely. Is anything else you’d like to add?
Ah, yeah, um, things I do, you might want to encrypt your computers and hard drives, you know, things like that. Because, you know, what, what if you know, your Xbox, sometimes xpander might know a little, for example, in a case where shared custody, you know, where you live. So even the xpander have access to your home and grab one of the USB stick your computer and take a look around. They might, you know, they might see what they’re not supposed to see. So you got to encrypt all of that. You know, computer’s hard drive USB sticks, you know, so if that’s a concern you got to include this is
Tony skinner
absolutely. Alright. Thanks very much for that information at AI security. guru.com. And thank you very much, Terence.
Yeah. And my booth is over there as well for those who are interested. Thank you. Okay.