Hope:
Adam.
Beau Friedlander:
Are you okay?
Adam Levin:
Yeah.
Beau Friedlander:
Poor fella. Hey, someone pat him on the back. Hey, Travis.
Travis Taylor:
Yes.
Beau Friedlander:
How are you?
Travis Taylor:
Better than Adam.
Beau Friedlander:
Not you, Travis.
Travis Taylor:
Oh.
Beau Friedlander:
Adam, you sound like you’re dying.
Adam Levin:
No, it’s just my new way of saying, Beau.
Beau Friedlander:
See, my name fills you with such glee that you choke.
Adam Levin:
I am. I am overwhelmed by excitement. I am, the little hair on the back of my neck are not standing up through the fear. They are tap dancing with joy.
Beau Friedlander:
Phenomenal.
Travis Taylor:
That makes for an mental image.
Beau Friedlander:
I like to think of Adam, tap dancing. Imagine if you were like Jimminy Cricket with a little cane.
Adam Levin:
Or imagine if you were like Tom Cruise in Maverick. Flying those jet planes.
Beau Friedlander:
They got the little short guy who is a Scientologist.
Adam Levin:
Who had the biggest movie of his entire career?
Beau Friedlander:
Well.
Adam Levin:
97% Rotten Tomatoes, 99% audience approval.
Beau Friedlander:
Does that mean that it was 97% rotten?
Adam Levin:
No, it means it was 97% unbelievably awesomely skideladacious, exciting beyond all comprehension.
Beau Friedlander:
Really?
Adam Levin:
Yes, sir.
Beau Friedlander:
All right. Whatever. Do you know who this Tom Cruise guy is? Tom, what’s your name? Travis?
Travis Taylor:
Yeah, I can’t say I familiar.
Beau Friedlander:
No, I’ve I’ve never heard of him either.
Adam Levin:
That’s why I’m so excited dealing with extremely contemporary superstars of podcasting Travis and Beau.
Beau Friedlander:
You can say what you like, but I just watched the Seven Samurai and I was perfectly thrilled by it. Then Travis told me that it actually was the best movie ever made. This Top Gun Maverick can’t be.
Travis Taylor:
Unless Toshiro Mifune was in a cockpit, which would probably be a pretty fun movie.
Beau Friedlander:
That would be awesome, actually.
Travis Taylor:
Wait, he was in a Torah Torah Torah, I think, right?
Adam Levin:
Yes, he was.
Beau Friedlander:
What’s going on in the news this week?
Travis Taylor:
Well, there are a couple of things. The Goodwill ransomware has been making a lot of headlines.
Adam Levin:
I love that.
Travis Taylor:
Interesting tech.
Adam Levin:
I love that. If you’re going to do something bad, at least make it good.
Travis Taylor:
Right? Yeah, they lock up your data and then try to make sure that, or they get you to commit kind and charitable acts to get it back.
Beau Friedlander:
What was the nature of the good deeds folks had to do in order to get their data back?
Travis Taylor:
You need to donate money and clothes to the poor, and then you need to furnish proof.
Beau Friedlander:
I love when he uses verbs like furnish, Adam.
Travis Taylor:
Provide.
Beau Friedlander:
Again, I bet you there’s a one syllable word that would do it too.
Travis Taylor:
Give.
Beau Friedlander:
Ah.
Adam Levin:
Throw.
Beau Friedlander:
I would throw. I throw this information at you. Give me my data back.
Adam Levin:
I will toss you the money and I will ask you as I fling my camera toward you to press the shutter.
Beau Friedlander:
That’s my favorite game with you is fling the camera.
Adam Levin:
Fling the camera.
Beau Friedlander:
Dunk. What do we think? Is this a good hacker? Is this the Glinda hacker or is this a shit head just being a shit head in a new end, slightly more annoying way.
Travis Taylor:
I think the latter.
Beau Friedlander:
Hmm.
Adam Levin:
Yeah, there is no such thing as a good hack. There is no such thing as a good person who does a good hack, unless they are doing something for the benefit of society, like stopping a war, primping the other side, when it comes to the enemy.
Beau Friedlander:
We don’t like hackers, no matter what they’re doing and we-
Travis Taylor:
I wouldn’t go that far. I mean, there are some things, some examples of activism I think are fine, but I think one of the things about this is their goals sound like it’s supposed to be lofty. It just sounds kind of silly. From their notice, what they said is once all three activities are completed, the victims should also write a note on social media, on quote, how you transformed yourself into a kind human being by becoming a victim of a ransomware called Goodwill.
Beau Friedlander:
Was it ransomware as a service too?
Travis Taylor:
I’m not sure. We don’t really know yet.
Beau Friedlander:
It might have been like a bunch of hippies living in the top of a Redwood tree who decided by the way, if you are a hippie living in the top of a Redwood tree and somehow you have enough electricity, well, you could have a solar panel anyway, to listen to this show, awesome for listening to the show. Rate and review. Totally. Also you can do better than the stupid Goodwill ransom as a service ransomware, as a service attack. It’s sort of lame.
Travis Taylor:
Yeah. It’s like the patchouli of ransomware.
Adam Levin:
Welcome to What The Hack, a show about hacker scammers and the people they go after. I’m Adam, cyber black cat.
Beau Friedlander:
I’m Beau, cyber scardy cat.
Travis Taylor:
I’m Travis, cyber battle cat.
Adam Levin:
Today we continue Hope’s story of cyber stalking. If you haven’t heard the first part, go back and listen to Hope’s Hacker Husband Turns Out the Lights part one.
Travis Taylor:
A warning again, we talk about stalking in this episode. If that’s a sensitive topic for you, you might want to skip this episode.
Adam Levin:
When we left off, Hope’s home had seemingly turned against her. Her techy husband had wired the whole house to be controlled by his phone. When they run better terms, this never even presented itself as an issue, but now that their hostility had escalated and a relationship with Bob had disintegrated, Hope found herself at home with all of her lights and technology shut off remotely. With only a landline working, she called the police.
Hope:
It was in that instance that this was a third person telling me maybe it’s time to get a protective order. Maybe it’s time to put some physical space between the two of you that I finally said, you know what? It’s time, because in context of having children in the home, that they do not need to see this, they do not need to take part in this. They do not need to be affected directly by this. I just thought it’s time. It’s really time, but for doing that for making that choice all hell broke loose.
Adam Levin:
What was the nature of the surveillance?
Hope:
I mean, just throw a dart out there and I’m pretty sure that you’ll hit.
Beau Friedlander:
In the beginning, give us an instance.
Hope:
I go to download an app and it’s sending the approval to his phone and I’m an adult.
Beau Friedlander:
Okay. All right, so your accounts are, you’re on a family Apple account.
Hope:
Yes. At the time it made sense. Economies of scale, but even beyond that, my bank accounts that had been my sole accounts prior to marriage, and even my business accounts, the emails were being sent to him, not me. I’m going …
Beau Friedlander:
Okay.
Hope:
Yes.
Beau Friedlander:
This is a really great example, at least this part of the story is a great example of the way a lot of identity theft happens.
Hope:
Absolutely, 100%.
Beau Friedlander:
Which is someone who’s close to you who can get into your stuff.
Adam Levin:
Yeah. Well they know everything. They know everything about you, they know your passwords, they …
Hope:
Absolutely.
Adam Levin:
They know your accounts. They know your social security number.
Hope:
And good luck filing a report with the identity theft people at the government, because they’re like, well, they can do that. They’re not concerned with this stuff and they don’t really understand. This is the other piece of it. Financial abuse occurs in up to 99% of abusive relationships. For the most part, domestic violence is, it’s very, very arbitrary. It’s very subjective and it has to be recognized.
Hope:
It has to be in the context of something that is criminal. The problem with that is financial abuse is about numbers and banking and things like that. It’s all tracked. Every transaction has a transaction ID and it has a date and has a time stamp on it. It’s very, very finite and easy to prove, but they don’t take the time to do that.
Hope:
You can continue to harass someone for a very long time if they don’t pick up on the other side of it. When you go in, if you look at the statutes where I lived, you can actually find where someone does not have the right. Like, if your internet provider comes in and they set you up, or even a network admin in an office.
Hope:
They set you up, they put you on online and they leave. They’re not supposed to come back in and take your account and log back in again and again. It would be the same for spouses, particularly where businesses are concerned because there were businesses. those boundaries were crossed and unless someone is familiar with the laws and how they’re set up, they’re just statutes saying that you cannot do that. That would be whether you were a partnership or even a familial relationship, like a parent child, but because the laws don’t understand that and the statutes are spread out throughout, through state and federal law. If you’re not familiar with the nuances, you’re not going to pick on it, and that’s basically what happened.
Travis Taylor:
I think one thing just to go back to get a little more into the nuts and bolts. When you say that he started having the information sent from your account to his email, did he actually change the email address on your accounts or did he set it up that he was also being forwarded things that were coming through to you?
Beau Friedlander:
Was it invisible or was it something you could see in the settings?
Hope:
It was both.
Travis Taylor:
That’s something where obviously if he changes the email address on the account, that is just pretty much a blatant act of locking you out of an account, but if you put something on there as just a little bit of a forwarder, that I …
Beau Friedlander:
Well, maybe you’ll see that he has himself CC’d on the account.
Travis Taylor:
Right. Exactly. Set up an email rule or something, which is harder to see unless you’re really looking for it.
Hope:
Correct. So A, the name on notifications I was receiving changed from mine to his, and they were my accounts. My sole accounts, some were community accounts. Some were my business accounts, which was jarring. Then it switched to, I found, and this was a catalyst for me to leave the relationship. I discovered an email forward set up for my business mail that I was unaware of because I was not receiving mail from my mail provider and it was a paid mail provider.
Hope:
At that point, when I figured it out, I thought it was just a fluke that something was wrong. Maybe there was an outage and then realized that there was a filter set up and it was just being rerouted and then ultimately lost access completely to my mail.
Travis Taylor:
Wow. Did that lose you a lot of business or?
Hope:
In that case, it was a different email account. It wasn’t business related, but I did miss notices that were important to being an autonomous adult every day, like paying your bills or being aware and informed of what’s going on in your life and in your world.
Adam Levin:
Well, that could negatively impact your credit if you don’t know when your billing date is, and you don’t get the notice, which is designed to make you more reliant on him.
Hope:
You hit the nail on the head.
Beau Friedlander:
Okay. This sounds super fun. Are you at this point living together and so he also has access to your stuff or have you stopped living together?
Hope:
We are not living together. We are in separate places. The places that we had were both jointly owned and there were things that were mine that needed to be mine. There were things that needed to be his, and everything was kind of spread out all over the place, but no, we were not together. That was by choice and I had to seek a court intervention to make it be that way.
Beau Friedlander:
The kids are going between the houses, yeah?
Hope:
Yes, and that’s the paradox is that when you have situations where one parent might be potentially harming another parent, the courts are very paradoxical in the sense that they say the kids are just completely separate. Everything is in a vacuum. You might have one partner that is perpetrating violence against another partner. The way they treat the kids is completely separate. Like there’s no crossover, it’s inconceivable to the courts that if a parent is harming another parent, that they could also be harming the children because we have to give everybody the benefit of the doubt.
Travis Taylor:
In terms of this, when you were living separately, did you notice the surveillance or the multiple types of intrusion? That sounds like outright sabotage, did that continue?
Hope:
Absolutely. Got worse.
Travis Taylor:
Got worse. How so?
Hope:
After I left the relationship, after I put the boundaries in place, I actually found I was being surveilled to the point where there’s a camera in my home in a place that I would have a reasonable expectation of privacy and images of me that I would rather have not been seen, because I didn’t think that I would display them in public, were recorded and distributed against my wishes and without my consent.
Beau Friedlander:
Wow.
Adam Levin:
What kind of camera?
Hope:
A little, like a lipstick camera.
Beau Friedlander:
He had created a bespoke security system in your house. Was this to keep you from getting robbed or, it sounds like he took well, in the regular way of putting it, he took nudes or something.
Hope:
They weren’t nude, but I was not dressed and I was definitely not in a state that I would want people to see me, at work or personally, or family.
Beau Friedlander:
Did you know there was a camera where this took place or was the camera hidden?
Hope:
The camera in this case was hidden, but there were other cameras utilized that were very, very day to day cameras that I wouldn’t have thought anything about.
Beau Friedlander:
Okay.
Adam Levin:
How did you find out about the hidden camera?
Hope:
The hidden camera I found because of my sense of paranoia. I’m not a paranoid person. I’m a very aware person. I’m again, from a city in the Northeast, where if I said it you’d go, aha. That’s just the way we are, but I was very aware of my situation.
Adam Levin:
A paranoid city.
Beau Friedlander:
Springfield, Massachusetts.
Hope:
Of course. I got to a point where I just, something is off and I don’t trust this. There seems to be a whole lot of knowledge about me that I don’t really understand. I went looking and one day I was looking around and I thought, I found this thing. Something was out of place and I grabbed it and it was hanging in a spot that I would not have suspected and found this camera and yanked it out and was then … When you’re being surveilled and it’s in the context of law enforcement, you’re found. The jig is up, but when the context of an abusive relationship, when you’re found often the violence escalates, because now they know that you’re aware of what they’re doing and it actually makes things worse and that’s pretty much what happened.
Beau Friedlander:
How did it get worse from there?
Hope:
Well, let’s see the images that were recorded that I was not happy about were sent to attorneys, to court experts to, I’m not really sure who all has seen them. In fact, I think that at some point, maybe a friend of his was documented as having seen them. I don’t really know who and really in conversations I had to go back through text messages and stuff we had because now I’m able to do this, but realize that there were instances where he’s saying, he’s got lots of pictures of me.
Hope:
In those cases, when you’re in a consenting adult relationship and it’s secure and there’s trust, or there was trust, you tend to do things because you feel like what are the chances of this happening? Unfortunately for me, you find out ultimately that your partner is not who you thought they were, it became now I’m like, oh my God, I’m really vulnerable.
Hope:
He’s telling me, I’ve got lots of pictures of you and in hindsight, going back and looking at the pictures, I’m going, oh my God. He’d gone through my photos, my hidden photos in my cloud. He’d taken pictures of me. Some that I knew about some I did not know about and I’m going, oh my God, I need to get those. Even still to this day, I’m still fighting for them because I don’t really know what all is there. I know I don’t have access to it and their possession, they’re of my likeness and the case law actually is in my favor because you’ve got the girls do porn case and all that stuff where there’s restitution being awarded to victims.
Hope:
They’re being forced to give up all rights to these pictures, sites, providers, disseminators, or distributors rather, they lose access to those things. In the context of my situation, none of that was applicable because no one really thought it was a big deal and no one really cared.
Travis Taylor:
I think one thing about the camera itself, especially if you found it in your closet, is that something, does that mean that he would’ve needed to have had physical access to your closet? Or could that have been something that was carried over from back when you were living in the same place?
Hope:
I’ll put it this way. The discovery of that camera was shortly before we stopped being the same place and he was actually not supposed to be anywhere near me. There’s nothing good that’s going to come out of it because either he put it in there before, and I didn’t know about it, or he came in after the fact when he wasn’t supposed to be there and put it in. Neither one is a good scenario.
Beau Friedlander:
Now, are you experiencing from this point, sounds to me like a form of sextortion, almost. What is the tenor of all of this? Why is Bob cyber stalking Hope the way that Bob is doing this? It sounds unhinged.
Hope:
Well, that’s just it. I think that there’s a reason that we no longer refer to this stuff as revenge porn, we call it non-consensual porn because revenge doesn’t have to be a thing. It could just be doing it to harass someone, to embarrass them, to ridicule them. My father has seen me naked and it was because of him.
Adam Levin:
Okay, there could be another reason too and that is the all seeing all knowing there’s no place for you to hide from me, know that I am with you wherever you are. I will always know what you’re doing. I mean, it could, beyond sextortion, this is emotional blackmail.
Beau Friedlander:
And intimidation.
Adam Levin:
And control.
Hope:
It’s the Wizard of Oz. Yep. It’s the ever present omni present, like Oz knows everything and Oz, you can’t hide Oz. Therefore I had to learn, and this is where I started becoming very, very willing to help myself and fight back the day that I figured out if I just kept that little file that I had to keep my stuff on my system, on my desktop, because I didn’t have a safe desktop.
Hope:
I hid my desktop and I hid it and it was tucked in a place where I didn’t believe it would be found. I then started going 100% the other direction. Okay. Well, if you’re going to do this, my passwords became four letter words and like, fuck off. Excuse me, excuse my French. If we’re going to do this, then I’m going to go back and we’re going to really go all in.
Hope:
I didn’t have any other choice. It was like, the jig is up. I know, you know that I can see what you’re doing. If we’re going to go there, then let’s really just let’s dance on that.
Beau Friedlander:
Were you able to get Bob out of your stuff at this point? I mean, if you know, were you able to get him to stop looking at your documents? I include in that, I assume there must have been some documents, whether or not you were married regarding your state of no longer cohabiting and having kids together.
Hope:
I mean, I got him out to an extent, but it took a long time to eradicate him per se, because when you’re in a relationship, that’s a long term relationship, it’s more than just a phone password or a email password. It’s banking, it’s children, it’s devices, it’s security systems, it’s home automation, it’s everything.
Hope:
Then beyond that, you think about all these, these little individual bits of information, but then I think the big .thing for me that kept me vulnerable was integrations. I ended up having to at one point, because I replaced all my devices. I had to abandon all of my prior apps and shared things with this person. I had to replace them all and start from scratch, but then realize that the integrations were giving me away.
Hope:
I’d have to go back to my roadmap and go, okay, well, I did this, this, this, and this, but weird things are still happening. Wait, wait, how are these connected? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. This is connected through this other app here. I gave permission on this thing. If I’m going to change this password here, I need to change it simultaneously with these four other ones to make sure that it’s done all in secession so there’s no backdoor in.
Adam Levin:
Well, but this is where you could bring in a profess, they’re not cheap, but you bring in a professional organization and they literally do a sweep of your home.
Hope:
Yeah, no, I tried it all. It didn’t work. It got to the point where even my scale betrayed me and that’s a very low tech tool, but I had a friend, a friend of a friend that introduced me and this was someone who’d experienced the same thing and had been married to a spouse. They’d had actually a software company together and she basically set me up and put malware bites on my devices for me to help me weed out some of the back doors.
Hope:
It was very, very challenging to keep going in day in, day out and function with all this stuff going on and not really know where it was all coming from. The high level people, they didn’t really want to get involved. I ended up doing a lot of my own, like Google university type stuff to learn as much as I could because it didn’t really exist in one collated central repository. I think that because a lot of this stuff is going to be a developer end stuff. It’s not going to be for someone that’s an end user like me. It’s not going to show up in the context of this. They leave the lowest common denominator stuff available.
Beau Friedlander:
Travis, just for the sake of listeners, can you explain to explain what a Mauler bite is?
Travis Taylor:
Malware bites is a security software like anti malware that’s made to look for unwanted or otherwise unseen programs or apps.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh my God. I heard the composer Mauler and bite. I was like, I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about. I happen to have malware bites on my computer now, so not that it’s the best or the only, but that’s what I use.
Adam Levin:
Some Beethoven fans thought that Mauler bites, but that’s another story.
Beau Friedlander:
I am going to go out on a limb here, Hope. I have a very low tech, kind of low tech actually, spyware ish, answer for why you’re continuing to get hacked by somebody who should, by all rights have no way to get in anymore because you’re being careful. You want to hear what it is?
Hope:
Of course. Shoot.
Adam Levin:
Do we have a choice?
Beau Friedlander:
You have no choice. Now I could be wrong. I could be wrong. I think that it’s possible that the vector of attack is your children and the way that whatever code or situation or hard or software attack that’s happening in your world, it’s happening through something that’s traveling between your homes. It’s hard to say, because obviously I don’t want you to confiscate your children’s stuff, but Travis and I were talking about this earlier and there’s even a charger cord that has been known to have enough power to hack into your system. Right Travis?
Travis Taylor:
It intercepts data. It can log your key strokes. It can download any information. It’s sort of the ultimate man in the middle.
Beau Friedlander:
It’s the size of the actual thing that plugs into your, the USBC, the USBC plug.
Travis Taylor:
Yeah, and you can buy it online.
Beau Friedlander:
It’s quite possible since chargers are, I know with my own children, chargers are more, more valuable than rubies. If they can grab a couple chargers, so they don’t have to bring a charger around with them, they will always do that. And they’re grown. It’s pretty weird. But at any rate that would be one way. Travis, do you have some other thoughts as to how Hope may still be getting targeted?
Travis Taylor:
Yeah. Well, if they happen to be on your wifi and that wifi password is saved to their devices, all Bob would need to do is take a look at what the wifi network name is and then the password.
Beau Friedlander:
What about if in the proceedings of Bob and hope no longer liking each other, there were some documents. Could Bob put something in a document that Hope has to read that would be infecting?
Travis Taylor:
Yeah, you can pass malware through Microsoft office documents are one of the preferred ways to do it, but you can do it through a PDF really. I mean, you can just have a unwanted passenger on any number of just basic files that would be part of a separation. Or if you’re sending over bills or even just standard emails and documents.
Beau Friedlander:
All right. Well then it sounds to me, Adam, that you have to … I don’t intend to ever not be with my partner, but it sounds to me like if it ever does happen, I would be smart to get a brand new computer and log in at the library to do all of my breaking up related business so that it was completely isolated from all my other business. I mean, is there some way to avoid?
Adam Levin:
I don’t think I would log in at the library per se, but …
Beau Friedlander:
Through a VPN.
Adam Levin:
I think the other thing too is, is it possible that Bob has had access to your communications with counsel? Because I assume you’ve retained counsel on this, in your separation or divorce proceedings, whatever they may be, that he’s also anticipating certain things that you may or may not be doing. I throw that in there as …
Beau Friedlander:
Oh, to cheat. Just to be a spy.
Adam Levin:
Yeah.
Beau Friedlander:
Hmm. That’s true.
Hope:
I mean it’s probable. I, in the very beginning did get all new devices sensing this. My sibling is aware and savvy enough and actually has a fair amount of knowledge about this stuff. Started to change things immediately. Things like instead of using the little charger bases, you install the walls that have the USB or USC ports in them to avoid that. I stay clear of their stuff and use only my own chargers and no one gets on my wifi. The devices don’t, which is a very, very unpopular rule around my casa.
Adam Levin:
Did you replace your router?
Hope:
I did. It was all brand new out of the box.
Beau Friedlander:
Wow.
Hope:
When you’ve got new devices, new email addresses, new phone numbers, new phones, new everything, and it still happens and you’re going, where did I go wrong? What did I miss? That’s where-
Adam Levin:
When you replaced your router, did you change the password on the router?
Hope:
Well, let’s put it this way. I didn’t replace the router that we had. I got a whole new internet line. I had to keep the old devices on the old network and the new devices on the new network. We didn’t cross them because it would’ve revealed everything. The new line had its own brand new router, brand new modem, brand new devices. There was not any crossover and different names, different password balls, different manufacturers of things just to create that separation.
Hope:
There was no link. There’s no direct link to me and it still didn’t prevent what would happen. During the pandemic, when everybody’s home and working on stuff and the internet would get slow and you go, oh, that kind of sucks. You expect that to happen but at some point it got really, really, really slow. I’m now calling the ISP to come out and investigate. They’re looking at their equipment outside of my house with their line and going, yeah, it works just great. You run it back into my house and it was the same and I’d reset the password and it would be fine again.
Hope:
Now I’m trying to detect new devices that are on the network that have somehow toggled along, even though none of the old legacy devices were ever allowed on. Even friends and friends of friends, no one was really allowed on that network. Really, by the end of it let’s face it. Nobody wanted to be on my network. I became very, very unpopular because it was really creepy stuff.
Hope:
People were like, I don’t want any of that. This is just too complicated. I don’t want to deal with this stuff. The little people are like, they’re just pissed. They’re like, it’s all weird. I don’t really care, I don’t really want to come anymore.
Adam Levin:
This is like spy versus spy.
Travis Taylor:
Or like a digital version of bedbugs.
Hope:
Yeah, it is. I was not the super good spy. I was a sucky spy. I was spy enough to still be a spy, but not a very good one.
Travis Taylor:
I think one thing I would take a look at is to also see, I mean, I’m assuming you’re using an iPhone and then if you’re using an iPhone to check to see if it’s jail broken. Jail breaking, by that I mean [inaudible 00:33:11].
Hope:
I did all that. [inaudible 00:33:11] looking to see if the cidiom is installed. Did all that. I mean, I’m going to go a step further.
Adam Levin:
Love it. She’s so good.
Hope:
I did do all that stuff. I remember calling Apple and they didn’t really take me seriously. And I’m like, all these things are happening and they’re like, well, we just don’t know. I’m like, do you really not know? Is it that I’ve gotten low level support enough? Or do you really just, you’re telling me you don’t know when you guys are really going back to your developers and you’re now going back and going, okay, she just found something and I’m thinking I need to get paid a bounty for this.
Hope:
In reality, as I’m learning to dig through my system files, I’m going, holy crap. Here’s a password export file. That’s what I’m finding in my system logs of all this stuff and I’m going, how on earth would anybody experiencing this, that is not willing to go to the lengths that I have find this stuff?
Beau Friedlander:
They wouldn’t.
Travis Taylor:
Right.
Hope:
That’s the next level of stuff. As I went through, I was like, you know what, nothing is off the table here. I had to go back and treat everything and everyone as a potential vulnerability until I could absolutely confirm that that wasn’t the case.
Beau Friedlander:
Now Hope, did you actually, I need to really, did you find a passport exporting piece of malware on your phone?
Hope:
On my phone and my system logs on my desktop. Yep.
Beau Friedlander:
You did. When was that?
Hope:
What I did was I ended up exporting all those files off. I had my phone image or not my phone. I had my phones and all my devices imaged by a digital forensic expert just to keep it all separate from me in case the malware came back and destroyed my files. This was found probably within a month or two after a month or two after the separation, like the physical separation. I think that the files that I found, they weren’t all related to just specific times.
Hope:
In some cases, I don’t think I could find the dates, but they went back quite a ways. I found, and this is the funny thing is, I always tell people, when you’re in this situation, something doesn’t seem right, just take a picture, take a snapshot, take a screenshot, whatever it is and just store it. A lot of the stuff I found, it was there, but it wasn’t until way later after I’d learned some things or I found some other context that it became relevant. I would come across and go, oh my God, this is the answer to that. This is this missing puzzle piece.
Hope:
At the time when I documented it, I had no explanation for it. I didn’t even have an inkling of how it fit into the things.
Beau Friedlander:
That’s a great idea to take pictures. It’s very smart.
Hope:
Well, it’s not even taking pictures. It was like, I got a whole separate cloud storage service. I mean, I’m telling you, I’m storing something to the effect of between six and nine terabytes of data because in these circumstances …
Beau Friedlander:
All related.
Hope:
Yeah. I mean, you can go back and we can exclude it. It’s easier to exclude stuff than it is to need it and not have it. That’s where I started piecing it all together. I mean, I found going back years before I’d found the email forward or the filter that I wasn’t aware of, I’d found another one a couple years before and it was doing the same thing, but I didn’t know what it was.
Hope:
I’m going, oh my God, here’s this. Now it makes sense. I’m going back in the timeline and going, holy cow, I’ve been under the microscope for even longer than I recall.
Adam Levin:
What a just tragic, tragic amount of life upheaval that you’re going through because of all this. I mean the amount of time, the amount of investigative work, the amount of additional work that you’re doing while you’re trying to have a career.
Beau Friedlander:
And be a mom.
Adam Levin:
And be a mom is totally insane.
Beau Friedlander:
And date.
Adam Levin:
Yeah.
Hope:
That was so far off. I just didn’t have any wherewithal to do that. I remember thinking, okay, I’ll just wait until this blows over. Then I will focus on that and then getting to the point where I’m like, okay, well, so much for that plan, because this is taking far longer than I ever thought. Then getting to a point where finding a really nice guy that I like, and they would see me get into a tissy because I now feel vulnerable and panicked when this stuff would happen and I’m going, but this happened, this happened.
Hope:
They have no idea what I’m talking about and I’m pissed that they don’t know and they don’t understand what I’m talking about. They’re like, what’s wrong with you know? then it’s easier to just get rid of them and just stay clear and just fly below the radar again, alone for a while, than it is to invite somebody in and try to explain it to them because they won’t get it.
Adam Levin:
No, and there are many people in this world that have the attitude that I got enough service going on in my own life. I look toward a relationship to be an Oasis.
Hope:
This is not it.
Adam Levin:
This is not the Oasis that I’m looking for, which is again, another horrendous collateral damage impact that you’re suffering as well as this [inaudible 00:38:21].
Beau Friedlander:
For all of you, non-Jewish listeners out there, souris is a word that means?
Adam Levin:
Tumbled.
Beau Friedlander:
I was going to say, oy. Now I’m going to ask you a question. It’s towards the question of where the light at the end of the tunnel is here, Hope if there is, Hope. I have to ask you, say this is ongoing. What sort of things are happening now in your digital life that lead you to believe that Bob is still bobbing and weaving and trying to get into your digital life?
Hope:
Well, it’s funny because shortly after meeting Adam, I sent him a screenshot and it was an alert that I got a weather alert that went to one device, my phone, and it didn’t go to any of the other ones that I have, of which there are many in my world, my Mac world. It was just to the one device to no place else. No one else. I was actually in the process of communicating with somebody at the time I received it, they didn’t receive it.
Hope:
It would’ve been a regional type of alert and there was no explanation for it. Here after all this time, I mean, I’ve changed, since even the modem and the router that we talked about that I got. I’m not even using those anymore. In fact, I have a brand new one in the box for the next time that my modem doesn’t seem to be protecting me, that I’m going to pull it out, provision it and keep going just to not have any downtime.
Beau Friedlander:
Do you think you were hacked? Do you think that was a hack that somebody was in your phone and something glitched?
Hope:
I don’t know. I mean, it let’s put it this way. I mentioned I’m in the Southwest and our weather at this time of year is pretty static and it was weather that would be very, very uncommon.
Beau Friedlander:
At this point, I can’t imagine, I’m not saying that you imagined anything, but I can’t imagine that you can walk through life right now without just feeling like every moment is perilous online.
Hope:
I mean sometimes yes. I mean, I’ve learned to find solace in nature because there’s no tech there. After you go through being watched and surveilled for so long, I started taking all my calls in the backyard and sensitive conversations and like, you’re going to need to leave your phone behind, leave your watch behind, leave any kind of tech you have with you behind. This is just going to be you and me and that’s it.
Beau Friedlander:
You’ve become Tony Soprano.
Hope:
Maybe [inaudible 00:41:09].
Beau Friedlander:
I didn’t mean that in a negative way. Meant that in a positive way.
Hope:
Yeah. I mean, out of necessity though, because I would rather do that than risk inadvertently giving away more information than I already have and still it was a small price to pay and I just happened to like being in nature. It was like, okay, well then that’s fine. I’ll just do that.
Adam Levin:
It’s almost like you’re preparing to either go to a black hat conference or you’re getting ready to take a trip to China. These are all the things that people would do in order to cleanse their technological life in order to be able to go to a place where anything you do anywhere you go, someone’s watching.
Beau Friedlander:
No, I know it’s like phones off in a fair day bag in a safe.
Adam Levin:
The question, to put this in context, and it is a terrifying context, to put it in context. How long, how many years has this been going on?
Hope:
Almost a decade.
Beau Friedlander:
Oh my gosh. that is a remarkably long amount of time. You’ve got an experience that I think very few people, thank goodness, have. What advice would you give to a person in a similar situation?
Hope:
Well, when you feel paranoid, trust your gut because it’s really easy for someone to say, oh, you’re just being whatever. You’re just being too cautious. You’re being too sensitive. Those are things abusers say. Frequently I’ve found that people who have been in similar situations as me are actually very intuitive. They just don’t listen to themselves.
Hope:
I feel like if I’d listened to myself many, many years ago, I would’ve run screaming for the hills instead of furthering my relationship. If I had listened a few lessons before that I would’ve run before I got so tangled, but I thought that I was doing the honorable thing. In the end it may have been, but I was harmed. At some point I was like, in order for me to honor myself, I have to do this and I’m going to do it unapologetically because that’s the other thing that these abusers do is they make you feel bad for having boundaries.
Hope:
You have to have enough conviction to say this happened and while it sucks, I’m going to move on and people are going to come after me, but that’s okay. At some point you’ve really got to put your big girl, your big boy pants on and go. Not only is it okay, you, excuse my French for trying to take that from me because it’s my right. It’s mine and you can’t have it.
Adam Levin:
Do you see a light at the end of the tunnel or is it the headlamp of the oncoming locomotive?
Hope:
Both. It’s both because I’ve had to have frank discussions with my family about if something happens to me, you’re going to have a pretty good idea. If something tragic happens about the context and because I’ve been trying to sound the alarm bells for so long and no one would listen, if something happens, you take all the money that’s going to come from my demise and you go after all of these people, because I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.
Hope:
Then at the same time, live in the moment and go, okay, well I’m not going to be scared. What I am going to do is try and make sure no one else in the meantime experiences what I have and I’m going to try and share my story with as many people as I can so there is awareness because I’m not alone.
Hope:
the low level stuff is happening to far more people than are aware. The high level stuff is stuff in movies but for the most part, anybody can go back and surveil anyone. In one context, when a police officer showed up at my house to take a report, he goes, yeah, my ex-girlfriend did the same thing. He’s like, I got chills. It’s very, very commonplace. I think that if you go back and you look at the news from the beginning of this year, when we had the Olympics in China, all of our athletes were being advised to leave their phones at home and buy burners and take them instead.
Hope:
That’s really, really smart. Anybody going into a divorce and I would say this, even if you don’t think your spouse is targeting you or would go this route, not a bad idea to have a separate phone because you really don’t know who you’re with until you leave them.
Adam Levin:
Hope, I can’t even begin to thank you for sharing your journey, your trials and tribulations and for talking about something that people really need to listen to and think about.
Beau Friedlander:
And for your vulnerability and your generosity.
Adam Levin:
Yes, so God bless you for the fact that you stood up, that you continue to stand up and that you’re doing the right thing. Again, thank you so much for sharing this experience with us and our listeners.
Adam Levin:
I am exhausted. This was really something. It is just horrendous, what Hope had to go through and is continuing to go through.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah. Imagine how she feels. I mean, you’re exhausted. She’s been 10 years. I mean, I can’t even imagine having that kind of situation and I’ve had experiences with the police with cyber related things and they’re useless. They really are useless. Travis, is there any particular reason why they’re useless?
Travis Taylor:
Well, most of the laws in the books and most of the ways that we enforce those laws were really just not meant with cyber in mind, especially not in a domestic situation.
Beau Friedlander:
Yeah. I mean, you think it’s hard enough to prove spousal abuse in the various forms of spousal abuse that occur where they’re physical and there’s physical evidence, cyber is just, it does present really difficult problems for the victim and for law enforcement alike.
Adam Levin:
For the victim, it creates PTSD.
Beau Friedlander:
I think that without question, it creates PTSD and we know from all the stories that we hear, that it’s quite possible, that last story she brought up, which made her approach you in the first place, where there was a glitch in the matrix that she saw, you must reach a point where everything has significance and nothing has significance. You just walk around in a constant state of siege.
Travis Taylor:
I think one of the other things that stood out to me here though, is that with most of the other guests that we’ve had with the scammers and the hackers that they’ve encountered, it hasn’t been personal. If someone’s trying to break into your credit or someone’s trying to get you in a gift card scam or something like that, they’re really just looking for an easy target. The main advice that we have is, okay, a little bit of extra security will make you a harder target. Then that scammer, that hacker will move on. In this case, if it’s someone who is for them, it’s personal, it is so much harder to secure yourself digitally.
Beau Friedlander:
No, I know it’s almost as though this is the black mirror version of a Bruce Willis in Die Hard. It just will not stop and it’s totally personal. I think that’s a super interesting point because yeah, for most cyber crime, it’s nothing personal. Just send me one Bitcoin and I’ll be gone, but this is new territory for us.
Beau Friedlander:
My DAD-A, D-A-D-A base, my DAD-Abase of jokes is completely empty when it comes to the situation. Other than that joke, that it’s just, there’s no comeback to any of this other than, I guess, being really grateful that we have this forum to talk about best practices and keep people safe. Right?
Travis Taylor:
I think keeping your device separate. It’s something where I think a lot of, one of the main areas where Hope into some difficulty is that she was trying to separate her digital life and digital identity after the fact. I think just as a preemptive measure, you should be able to have your own device. You should be able to have an account that no one else, even the people who are closest to you have access to. Just in case you happen to need that at some point, you do have a means of keeping your communications private.
Adam Levin:
Well, this is a parallel with what we tell people about credit, is that when people get married, part of it is that they will mingle accounts because everything is, we want to be joint. We want to be in this together. You can also use one person’s strength to help another person through credit weakness. At the same point, you still need to define yourself in a career, in a life and with devices, it is very important to have a separate path. Not because you’re going to use it for sinister reasons, but because it’s going to give you an opportunity to be a little bit independent from the other person. That’s a healthy thing. It’s not a bad thing.
Beau Friedlander:
Is that why you keep looking in my phone every two seconds, Adam?
Adam Levin:
Well, I have a device planted on your phone. I’ve had it for years.
Beau Friedlander:
I like it. Actually, I talk to it sometimes at night when I’m feeling lonely.
Adam Levin:
I know. I listen and it makes me feel better. I feel like we’re communicating. We’re bonding.
Beau Friedlander:
Actually, Kenneth, the bear was looking through my phone and he saw that you had implanted that thing, whatever it is that makes you listen to me and he cried.
Adam Levin:
He did cry and then he implanted a second thing, knowing that you found the first thing, just so that we could keep the string going.
Beau Friedlander:
I hate that cozy bear.
Adam Levin:
He loves you.
Beau Friedlander:
He’s very sweet. Travis?
Travis Taylor:
Yes. I’m just sad thinking about a crying bear.
Beau Friedlander:
Just leave us hanging. He let us go down the Primrose path of our imaginary bear friend and you have to just leave us hanging there.
Travis Taylor:
Well, in doing a little bit of a prep for this episode, I think one of the things that really stood out to me, speaking of the spy cables and like is how easy it is to procure equipment to cyber stock someone.
Beau Friedlander:
I know that stuff should be illegal. It really should be. It’s like the cyber equivalent of a roofie, date drug or whatever you call that stuff.
Adam Levin:
Oh, and we’ve talked about this, that there ought, when we say there ought to be a law.
Travis Taylor:
Well, the tricky thing too though, is the fact that with these, they call them pen testing tools. What they say is that there are legitimate security applications and there are, but there, I think can cover a lot of ground and lead to a lot of difficulties for people.
Beau Friedlander:
Hey, you know, they said the same thing about Oxycontin and there’s totally legitimate uses for it, but created a nation of zombies. I don’t know. I think obviously there’s a profit motive behind selling these things and where there’s an ability to spy on somebody there’s always going to be somebody who’s willing to buy that ability.
Travis Taylor:
It’s also, I mean, there’s a level of prestige there that if you’re the first person to think of something like, hey, I made a type of malware that’ll still stay on your iPhone because it only makes it look like your iPhone’s restarting. That’s going to make you a celebrity in the field of cybersecurity and hacking and all that \other sort of stuff.
Travis Taylor:
It’s going to really raise your profile. I think that’s one of the things that ends up being tricky is because you’ll hear about someone creating something that has really, really, really wide ranging malicious uses. If they do that, if someone comes up with that, then they’re going to be able to book conferences and speaking tours for at least the next next couple of years.
Beau Friedlander:
Which is why we’ve been training Kenneth the bear to punch people who are proud of their exploits. That’s his new thing.
Adam Levin:
I thought it was clawing.
Beau Friedlander:
No, he punches. You didn’t see? You were the one who did the backhand thing so he wouldn’t scratch people.
Travis Taylor:
We have a mannequin with a black hat that we’ve been teaching him to maul. Thanks everyone for listening. We realized we covered some pretty difficult subject matter today, but we think it’s quite important. Along with this episode on the website, we’re going to put some resources for folks. If they’re going through something similar, and if you are experiencing a similar situation, please don’t hesitate to reach out. There are resources out there for you.
Beau Friedlander:
If you have a story that’s similar to this and you feel like no one wants to hear it, you’re wrong. We would be glad to talk to you and you don’t have to be a guest on the show. You can get in touch through our email on adamlevin.com or loud tree media, and just ask us for help. We’re here, or you can be on the show, but really honestly, if you ask, we will answer. What the Hack with Adam Levin is a production of loud tree media.
Adam Levin:
It’s produced by Andrew Steven, the man with two first names.
Travis Taylor:
You can find us online at loudtreemedia.com and on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, at Adam K Levin.
Adam Levin:
Loud Tree.
