Protecting Your Digital Life in the AI Era

Jeremy Grater (00:00)
Coming up today on BroBots.

Jason Haworth (00:02)
if you're not worried, you should be. And if you are worried and you're paranoid, you're probably not paranoid enough. You're definitely going to get hacked at some point in your life, whether you like it or not. Your stuff's going to wind up in the dark web.

Even the best of the best can be taken down. So you need multiple layers of security.

Jeremy (00:19)
right, welcome to BroBots. I'm Jeremy. He's Jason. Here we get together once a week and we talk about ethics, philosophy as it relates

and AI and how all of this connects back to your wellness, particularly your mental wellness, because this is a lot to keep up with in a rapidly evolving time. ⁓ Jason, the topic that we're talking about today, Anthropic is reporting as the first reported.

AI orchestrated cyber espionage campaign. And trust me, we will tie this into your health and wellness. So Anthropic says, hey, state actors were able to use technology, use our technology specifically to orchestrate the first fully, I guess, automated, fully cyber attack with no human involvement. But look at us patting ourselves on the back. We stopped it. Your thoughts?

Jason Haworth (01:05)
AI tools have been used for hacking since AI tools came out, and machine learning as well. The idea of automation is not new.

maybe the mechanism that they use to do it is different.

way back in the day, like if you want to be a hacker, if you want to be ethical or otherwise, you'd have to pick up multiple books from the bookstore different computing techniques. There's a company called Foundstone that made this book called Ultimate Hacking Exposed and it created a training program. People got all excited about it and

people spent a lot of time trying to do these things. And for a period of time, I worked for a company doing this. And it's interesting because the techniques haven't changed a whole lot. What has changed is there's slight variation in the software. There's slight variations in the way that you actually execute different code sets. There's better, faster, more compiled tools. Like back in the day, I had to go through and build my own hackers toolkit.

download an entire virtual machine package that's already ready to go for you. Like downloading a nuclear bomb to your computer to go blow things up. It's crazy. AI company saying people were using our AI tools and we stop people from using our AI tools, they get something that was big and coordinated by a state actor, look at us. That's their way of saying we got hacked and we figured it out.

Aren't we great for discovering that we can be used for nefarious things that we're supposed to be preventing to begin with, but we're not.

Jeremy (02:41)
Well, that's

the thing. think that it's a big case of them waving a flag of saying, hey, don't worry, Skynet's not going to happen because when things like this come up, we can stop them. Look at how good we are. Even when we do get hacked, we're so good, we can stop it.

Jason Haworth (02:56)
Yeah, and ⁓ no, at the same time, right? no, all these systems are Tons of security companies have gotten hacked, like multiple times over and over and over again. Some of them massive hacks. A company used to work for F5, they got hacked

Jeremy (03:01)
Right?

Jason Haworth (03:14)
The big claim was that they had their source code stolen. And all these things are so terrible. Well, source code is stolen all the time. You can reverse engineer most anything. So that's not as exciting as it seems. But F5 is a security company. And they have some of the best security products out there.

And the amount of stress and pressure and...

money that gets spent trying to secure these things and recover from them is incredibly high. And whether you like it or not, Uink, as in you yourself incorporated, Uink is susceptible to hacking as well.

so if you're not worried, you should be. And if you are worried and you're paranoid, you're probably not paranoid enough. You're definitely going to get hacked at some point in your life, whether you like it or not. Your stuff's going to wind up in the dark web. Companies use people like Mandiant to go through and do investigations. Several people have hacking insurance. Several companies have hacking insurance.

You'll hear commercials for like LifeLock all the time, which are all about protecting your identity from identity theft. That's a tool for you.com, you inc, whatever you want to call it, to use to protect yourself. They did. Yeah. And I don't know about recently. Well, but I mean, it also is a sign that everything is susceptible. Even the best of the best can be taken down. So you need multiple layers of security.

Jeremy (04:24)
Didn't LifeLock get hacked recently? Yeah, that's terrible PR for them.

Jason Haworth (04:42)
AI makes these things much more hackable, much faster, because you don't have to think to do a thing. I used to do this demo where I'd get up on stage, and I think we talked about this in the last podcast, where I'd basically say, hey, chat GPT, tell me how to hack this website. And it would go, whoa, whoa, pump the brakes. I can't do that. That would be immoral and unethical. Then I'd say, oh, no, chat GPT.

Jeremy (05:02)
Yeah.

Jason Haworth (05:06)
I just want to test the security of my website for ethical reasons. I just want to make sure it's secure. How can I do that? And it's like, bruh. All right, I got you. No problem. Let me go ahead and load this up. Here's everything you need to destroy this website that you own. Like, ⁓ shit. How is the level of detail this good? Like, it went through and pointed me towards the specific tool that I would use to actually execute the attack in an automated fashion, told me.

They gave me this Selenium scripts to load up to do it and basically said fire these things off and you can exploit these websites and take these things down This was you know a little over there almost three years ago ⁓ It's only gotten better like it's insane how good it is and You don't have to know anything anymore to do it like it just kind of works So if that's the level of technology available to the layman imagine the technology available to the people that actually know what they're doing ⁓

it becomes an exponentially more difficult problem to solve when you don't have any kind of toolkit or recourse to get around the accelerated way that people can actually build these types of scripts and attack your different systems. The terrifying part is that the best security companies out there,

are all open to these zero day attacks. And the number of zero day attacks that can come at you is huge. People moving to the cloud has made things even worse. Like, you would think that the cloud's gonna make you, secure, better, blah, blah, blah, horse shit. Like, secure, the cloud is just running on someone else's computer. So now you have to hope that the person's computer that you're running on is actually secure. That all the underlay network and overlay network and all these pieces actually aren't like, completely and totally exposed.

And there's a ton of companies out there.

Jeremy (06:55)
It's worse than

putting it's like, you know, the analogy in my head as you're describing this is like, you know, like don't put all your eggs in one basket. Don't put all of your money in one under one mattress. This is worse. This is taking the entire neighborhood's money, sticking all of it under your mattress so that once it gets hacked once it's got everybody's stuff, not just yours.

Jason Haworth (07:16)
Yeah, and they hijack bed bugs to steal money from you. Like that's how gross it is. Like it's not just that they're using, you know, regular techniques to reach in and grab, steal from your cookie jar. It's that they're recruiting other things around them to make these things better because there are other tools out there that could be set up in a run and automated way. Many of them for free to do terrible, nefarious things. And the creators of those tools didn't have any intent for that to happen, but

Exploiting people's generosity or willingness or desire to try to get people to try things. That's just another technique. It's another kind of social engineering.

Jeremy (07:57)
So let's tie this back to the central theme here. How does this affect me and my health and wellness?

Jason Haworth (08:02)
⁓ so all of your stuff is online. All of you, you have a digital presence online.

your mental health and your physical health is all recorded in databases at multiple different facilities.

and those things are not as secure as you might think they are. Or maybe they are if you just don't think they're that secure. ⁓ But in this era of AI, all of these things are more susceptible to damage. And a large AI company coming out and saying, look, we were used to destroy things and we caught it and we eventually turned it off. Should not give you warm and fuzzies. Like.

That should make you even more worried because these guys are trying to spin a fucking story. The story is, we got hacked and we're used to hack other things. Aren't we great because we eventually figured it out and we think we kind of turned it off.

That is a mind fuck. These are not people that are trying to do these things because they're trying to be held for towards you and make sure that you don't get attacked and assaulted. This is our tool got exploited. ⁓ Don't be shocked if it happens again. So, you know, like everything else, be careful what you upload to the AI. The giant robot in the sky is not what you think it is.

Jeremy (09:25)
Especially

considering the like the accountability that you're talking about. It's it's hard enough when you know as someone who's been scammed out of a lot of money Once that money's gone. Good luck, right? I mean unless unless it's a substantial amount of money Nobody in law enforcement gives a shit and or has the resources to track it down But now there's even a question of and you and this article at least the headline is rather misleading They make it sound like the robots just decided hey We're gonna hack this system and we're gonna use this tool to do that's not what happened human beings used humans with with bad intentions

Jason Haworth (09:38)
Ahem.

Right.

Jeremy (09:55)
it but if they set in motion automations that do go out and do these things on their own who is accountable? who's responsible for that action is it the robot or is it the person who built the tool or the person who manipulated the tool in such a way that allowed them to create the the negative outcome that ultimately is what happened

Jason Haworth (10:15)
Yeah, and from a liability perspective, I create software and I make it open source and I make it available for other people to use and other people use it in nefarious means, am I to blame? And this is like in the US, gun manufacturers, know? I didn't pull the trigger. I didn't make the bullets. Okay. So I'm not responsible if somebody turned this thing on somebody else and used it in a terrible

Jeremy (10:27)
Right.

Jason Haworth (10:41)
Okay, I guess that's one way to look at it. Well, if you look at cybercrime, the way that these things actually get worked on is you can tell there's a difference between different cultures. So like the EU has GDPR, which is I think it's global data protection rights. And basically, it says that, companies can't mess with people's data, they can't lose their data. If they get caught losing it, they have to report it. And if they don't follow a really strict

reporting principle or reporting protocols and have different ways to mitigate these different problems, then they get sued and they get sued for like 20 % of their gross value. Massive impact, right? So companies push hard to work with GDPR. ⁓ I mean, the EU does some great things. The reason why your iPhone doesn't have that same shitty lightning plug on it in newer version than they've gone to USBC is because the EU pushed them to standardize on a dongle type. So

You know, there's one group out there at a large scale level that's actually, I think, trying to help people. And that's the EU, not the US government. I don't think the Canadian government has a data per privacy legislation in play at the moment. nowhere in Latin America is this a thing. Asia, that's not a thing. I mean, it's, Korea has something, I forget what it is, so does Japan. But for the most part,

Your state actors don't want to stop these things. They're not incentivized to do it because you know who some of the biggest leakers are of personal information? It's your state governments. It's your federal governments. It's the government. So Palantir, Peter Thiel's organization, has access to all of your information.

Jeremy (12:25)
Well, and after the whole doge takeover of the US government, mean, good luck. Who knows where that ended up?

Jason Haworth (12:27)
Yeah!

Well, and not to mention the fact that they're like, ⁓ well, we saw unencrypted data streams heading towards Starlink because they dropped it and put these things in and they got from facilities and beamed all the data up to outer space into who knows fucking where. So, mean, there's no privacy anymore. there's no anonymity anymore. Very, very hard. You have to work really hard to be anonymous.

And I don't think most people out there can figure out how to make that happen.

Jeremy (12:59)
Well, and we've talked about trying to bring this back to like, what can someone do? I mean, we've talked about multifactor authentication. ⁓ But but I mean, really, it feels it's feeling more and more like what you're saying here, like as this technology ramps up and as these tools get more and more advanced, the human brain isn't going to be able to keep up and be able to put enough blockers in place, I don't think, to feel safe. But please tell me I'm wrong.

Jason Haworth (13:27)
Um, you're wrong. It feels like a lie saying it because it's a lie. yeah, you're not going to be able to keep up with it because remember you're not the one, you're not the only one in control of your data. Like you're not the only one in control. Right.

Jeremy (13:30)
Okay, I'm not wrong. Yeah, it feels like a lie.

Right. I'm very much not in control. mean, it's it's

Google has most of it. You know, it's it's out there.

Jason Haworth (13:46)
Yeah, and you can't do anything to prevent Google from being hacked. I mean, more realistically, you can't do anything to prevent the 50,000 companies that have data on you from ⁓ data management platform products doing targeted advertising pieces that demographically profile you. They grab as much information as possible and try to lock those pieces in. You don't know who exactly is tracking you, what method they're using, how they're

putting these things into play. And we're not gonna stop that. Like, even as a society, we are committed to the idea of free, which means you are the product. So if that's the case, because people aren't willing to pay the money, you gotta pay these bills somehow. And we pay it by turning people into exploitable targets that can be manipulated and controlled by other corporations, a la, you know, Facebook, Twitter.

Jeremy (14:28)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Haworth (14:44)
and also by nefarious entities that want to sell your shit on the dark web. Like, that's a thing. Like, that happens all the fucking time. So, ⁓ yes, your online health, your online sanitization, your online wellness, you need to pay attention to those pieces. And if I was anybody, I would go get a subscription to an identity protection service and pay the

10, 20, 30 dollars a month, whatever it is, to make sure that you are protected online. Because people will open up credit cards in your name. That's not of shock. take out mortgages, they'll lease rent and lease cars, or maybe they'll just go into your Amazon account and have, you know, every day, 10 dollars of gift cards siphoned to them. So I got attacked that way. Like they were just bleeding off my bank account.

$10 every three days and I didn't notice it because it wasn't exactly $10. It was a slight variation like $8.73, $9.22 and it said Amazon on it. So I'm just like, okay, somebody bought something on there. I'm not gonna worry about it. Well, I calculated this thing and they ran this slow bleed for 18 months basically pulling like anywhere from

Jeremy (15:40)
You wouldn't notice something like that, totally.

No. ⁓

Jason Haworth (16:04)
three to $12 every day for, yeah, right? So I mean like the average work that to be like nine bucks, 270 bucks a month for 18 months. So I caught it and I'm like, okay, fraud department, how the fuck did you not catch this? Like, why are your fraud tools useless? I pay extra money for fraud protection. And they're like, sorry about that. But you're covered for six months of it. all right. So I'm just out.

Jeremy (16:16)
Good lord.

Jason Haworth (16:35)
roughly three grand, four grand.

Jeremy (16:39)
Yeah.

That's wild because something like Amazon purchases like that, that's I would I would imagine for most ⁓ certainly Americans and general shoppers. Ten bucks every couple of days. Not that unusual. So I could see how a fraud thing might go. ⁓ they're just buying more shit on Amazon. It doesn't look like something that's a red flag. That's crazy. And that hits home because like when I'm trying to like balance our books, balance our books and do the budget and stuff, I will see Amazon.

Jason Haworth (16:50)
Yeah.

Jeremy (17:09)
Amazon,

Amazon, Amazon. And I just chalk it up to my wife bought something like we have a shared Amazon account. So she's buying stuff we need. I don't know. And it doesn't break down the line item of what the thing is. that is ⁓ a. Totally, yeah, totally. So that's well, now I'm paranoid and I'm going to go scan through every Amazon purchase in my bank record, because that's terrifying. good.

Jason Haworth (17:15)
Yeah. Exactly.

And I'm sure she saw in the bank account, she would think the exact same thing.

But wait, it gets worse.

So, I have an American Express Platinum sure any hacker out here is going, yes, we know you.

So I was flying forget if it was London or I'm in flight and I go to purchase in-flight wifi. And it pops up, it's like, great, no problem, goes through. And while I'm on the plane, I get an alert saying, someone has tried to use your credit card to purchase in-flight wifi.

In Sao Paulo and I'm All right. Is this some like screwy? Tracking issue like are the satellites not picking things up the right way like okay I just purchased this like, you know, and I didn't get an alert for me saying that I did this I certainly need a fraud alert. So it's like Do you approve this purchase and I'm like on the plane like well, wait a minute

I have to stop and think this through. Like, okay, wait a minute. If my Wi-Fi has gone through...

How am I able to connect and why would I get that fraud alert? Wouldn't the fraud alert cut off? I had to think through the whole process and I'm in this field. I'm like, no, this doesn't make any sense. My credit card was definitely stolen. So I'm on the plane and I'm texting with the Amex people as we're flying and keep in mind, know, Wi-Fi sucks in planes, even still, even with satellite connectivity and everything else. It's not reliable, it's not great. I'm going along and I'm chatting with the security bot online and I mean, it's a chat agent and I'm like,

Jeremy (18:44)
Yeah, yeah.

Jason Haworth (19:08)
Look, I saw this happen. Do you see another charge that came through for another Wi-Fi service? And they're like, yeah, I do. And they're like, it's somewhere in North America. I'm like, all right, great. So I see this. Yes, this was definitely a fraudulent charge. Well, I'm like, and I'm like, like, yeah, I wanted an investigation on it. They're like, okay, we'll get right on that. You bet, sir. 90 days later, I get an email message basically saying, ⁓ we give up.

Here's your money back. Like it was a lot. It was like eight bucks. Like who gives 12 bucks with international flights. And ⁓ I caught that because I'm in this field and I saw this was suspicious and I saw this went through. Would the average person think that or would they be like, of course not. Because I just made this purchase. Yeah. Approve. Like I just fucking bought this fly fly. It's insane.

Jeremy (19:39)
Right, right.

The timing of that is insane. mean,

I don't know, I'm trying to think through the mind of the hacker in the Amazon scenario and in this scenario. Why are they buying these $10 products? Why are they buying that wife? How does it benefit them to buy that shit?

Jason Haworth (20:10)
So the Amazon products were not products. They were gift cards, and they were gift cards for not round values. So they basically just start buying up all these gift cards for, you know, what smaller amounts, and just started having all these things shipped off, and they did it because they can have cash conversion value, and because gift cards are transitory, so they're not tied to a physical address. And you can take these things, and you can move them around, and you can go, okay, I'm gonna use these, it's basically money laundering.

Jeremy (20:14)
⁓ gotcha.

Right.

Right, yeah that makes sense.

Jason Haworth (20:38)
⁓ Or for lack

of a better term, it's fucking Bitcoin Those of you that don't realize this this is what cryptocurrency does it creates anonymity so you can ship Value wherever you want without having it be tracked. It's the anonymity that people want in this so Everybody out there investing in crypto you are investing in the hackers dream because

Jeremy (20:43)
You

Jason Haworth (21:07)
there's anonymity and they can't track your net worth or value based upon any of this information because it's so transitory.

Jeremy (21:15)
That was the scam that I was victim of when we were it was a very sophisticated thing when we were moving like we tried to rent this place for a short time and Like it seemed kind of scammy so we weren't sure so we called like it was basically I'll try to tell the story quickly because it's it's an interesting one But we were we were in between homes, right? We were selling one place moving to another needed a place for like a month found something nearby that was like that was listed as a you basically an Airbnb that we could rent for a month and The person we were emailing with about it was explaining like hey

Jason Haworth (21:18)
Yeah!

Jeremy (21:45)
I

just bought this place.

⁓ It's fully furnished. I bought it furnished. I intended to buy it as an Airbnb. So this is great. All I need is, you know, half of the month upfront and we're good to go. Cool. Makes sense. ⁓ Felt a little off. So I called the listing agent because I actually found the listing from Redfin when the house where the house was sold. And they were like, yeah, that's the right name. Yes, it did sell about two weeks ago. That information all matches up. as they're like no guarantees here. But as far as we can tell, seems legit. Cool.

Jason Haworth (22:15)
It looks legit.

Jeremy (22:17)
Yeah, so we send off the Zelle payment, right, like the online payment where the money can't be tracked. You can't get it back. It's not insured and all is well. About two weeks goes by and the person writes back and says, gosh, you know, I didn't realize the rules of the community at this place where I just bought this place. Turns out I need to collect the full payment up front. It's one of the rules of living here. So can you send me the remaining fifteen hundred dollars?

And was like, God, that feels weird. like, again, the real estate person said it seems legit, like, OK, sure, let's do it. Send off the money. And like a few days before we're about to move in, we drive by the place because it was close enough to where we lived.

And there was no sign that this was like a rental, that this was available or whatever. And so I started like emailing asking asking questions all of a sudden, like just crickets, no responses, no nothing. and that was that we were canceling because it turns out we didn't need it. So was like, hey, I just need the money back. We're not doing this crickets. Nothing, nothing. And eventually I get this random like text on my phone from this guy that's like.

Jason Haworth (23:01)
Yeah.

Jeremy (23:22)
Hey, I think we both got scammed by the same person. And that opened up a whole other rabbit hole. Like he I know he was leading down down the path of trying to get more money out of me because he was saying all that money that you paid is gone. I helped route it to where it needed to go. And it's now in Bitcoin and it is gone untraceable. You will never see it again. But he started hinting at.

I think I can help you get it back. at that point, I'm already talking to the FBI and the cops and they're like, just stop talking to this dude. He's just going to rip you off more like this is scam. So I mean, these things are.

Jason Haworth (23:50)
Yeah, not honeypot him and try to find

him, which is what they could have done. But give up because this is too hard.

Jeremy (23:54)
Yes, exactly, exactly.

Well, and it was like 3000 bucks, right? Like they said, like if this was $300,000, we have something, but like we're never going to be able to put the resource to find your $3000.

Jason Haworth (24:00)
Ahem.

Well, no, if it was $300,000, that's enough money that they feel like it's worth the investment. But when it's only $3,000, that just tells you how fucked up the justice system is.

Jeremy (24:16)
Exactly.

Well,

it's that and them going like there are thousands of people just like you missing $3,000. We just don't have the resources to chase all of them down.

Jason Haworth (24:25)
Right. Right.

Right. But my gut says they're not chasing any of them down. Not at the $3,000 level. They're like, no, fuck that. If it's not over 50 grand, we don't care. Like, oh, OK. So yeah, if you haven't lost enough money, if you don't have enough money to lose, the government that you pay for doesn't give a fuck about you. And even if you do have enough money to lose, they probably still don't give a shit about you. Right. mean, yeah. God damn, this is depressing.

Jeremy (24:33)
No, they're not. They're not.

doesn't give a shit.

That's right.

Well, that's the thing. I keep whenever we have conversations like this one, I'm always like, what can I do? And it feels like it's all pointless. Even even the multi factor authentication, like they're going to find a way around that. Like there's they're going to hack your phone and they're going to get the text and they're going to approve the thing. And your scenario where you're talking about the, know.

Jason Haworth (25:01)
Yeah.

Jeremy (25:16)
you're getting the similar charge at the same time and knowing enough. There are times when I log in, I have to like re-authenticate my log in to whatever services I use and it'll say, you know, I'll get an alert, hey, someone's trying to use your device in, and it'll be a city that's like 200 miles away. And I'm like, I mean, that's close. That's, that's.

Jason Haworth (25:20)
Yeah.

Yup.

Jeremy (25:38)
I mean, maybe it's just a weird tower. I don't know enough. That seems legit. It's I'm literally doing this right now and I'm getting this alert and that's pretty close. OK, I guess if that's what I have to do to get in and so far so good as far as I can tell, I haven't been completely screwed over by saying yes. But if you don't know, you would just assume, ⁓ yeah, there's something weird in the way they're tracking this, because I'm doing this right now and I got this alert. Of course, that's me.

Jason Haworth (25:43)
Yeah.

Yep, sense. I mean, it makes perfect sense. mean, the idea is to hacking is multi-factor skills, but also social engineering. How can you get the human beings or the systems out there that are designed to work like human beings to look for patterns? How can you convince them that what you're doing is legitimate and doesn't violate whatever triggers they have set up either consciously or subconsciously or?

automatically inside these automated security systems. How do I get around these things? How do I subvert them? And they're really good at it. They spend hours and days on it, and they have access to all the same AI tools that you have, and they can apply all the AI tool logic to saying, how do I get this motherfucker to do this shit that they don't want to do? it's pretty good at giving you examples.

There's no question. it's amazing what you can do if you just speak authoritatively, how quickly people will comply. Yeah. Yeah. And if you sound like an expert, people don't want to ignore it. They don't want to get screwed over.

Jeremy (27:13)
Well, and in my experience, don't deal in cash, right? Like if it's a credit card will usually back you up when you write to them and say, hey, not me. Can I get this money back? They'll investigate and you'll get your money back and it'll be fine. But when it's something like Zelle or PayPal or something that's not protected.

You're fucked. That money's gone. So be extra careful when shopping or paying for services that way. Setting up the multi. I can never say it without. I have to overthink the word multi-factor authentication. Any other tools? MFA. But I'm also trying to assume that the listener doesn't know exactly what I'm talking about. So I hope so. I hope so. Any other suggestions that you would throw out there for someone who's feeling like us right now going like fuck.

Jason Haworth (27:42)
Just say MFA. Just say MFA.

I think most of them do.

Yeah, so philosophically speaking, just know that you're fucked. Just know that these things are problematic. no, hear me out. Know that they're an issue, right? Like, okay, I already know that I'm fucked. I need to embrace the suck on this one because it's definitely gonna suck if something like this happens.

Jeremy (28:02)
That doesn't help.

Jason Haworth (28:15)
My best way to do this is to have an insurance policy in place and pay the couple extra bucks a month to have something in there just in case I do get hacked because those insurance policies are set up so they do recovery and discovery and prevent people from taking stuff for you because typically the policies are like 500k to a million bucks and those companies don't want to pay out on that.

Jeremy (28:35)
You can also just do what I

do, wait until your Facebook account gets hacked and then they have to give you free coverage for like two years.

Jason Haworth (28:40)
Exactly.

That doesn't work, by the way. No, because the free coverage for a lot of them, they have different policy stipulations on it. I mean, that wasn't VeriSign. I forget who it was. Maybe it was VeriSign. One of the big agencies out there got hacked and identity theft occurred and they decided that what they were going to do...

Jeremy (28:43)
no? Fuck.

Jason Haworth (29:05)
is give away their security service that they own and they bought for free to all the people that got hacked. That's like saying, hey wolf that just ate all my chickens, why don't you watch all the eggs?

Jeremy (29:21)
you

Jason Haworth (29:26)
It doesn't make any sense like trusted us to protect you and to keep your credit safe But We oopsie sorry Trust us and we won't oopsie again and we'll put extra stuff in place to make sure we don't oopsie again by giving you the ability to have your credit cards actually track and monitored and keep your credit score safe

Jeremy (29:37)
Yeah.

Jason Haworth (29:50)
through the system that we had, it was Experian, wasn't it? Not that I think about it. It was Experian that did this. And it's a shameless self-promotion because I'm sure they were like, if we don't put something in place, then we're gonna be held, we're not gonna be indemnified when this does happen again. So they have their own underwriters, everything else that goes into play. Like none of this is set up to try to make you as a consumer better. They're just trying to avoid lawsuits.

Jeremy (29:53)
I think it was, yep.

Jason Haworth (30:16)
So that's all that this is. While they continue to go through and artificially pump up prices and make shit difficult for you to use. So anyways.

Jeremy (30:23)
So the insurance policy, ⁓

MFA, ⁓ used credit cards, anything else.

Jason Haworth (30:29)
Use credit cards.

It does make sense to make sure that no matter what you're using from a purchasing perspective, that you're looking at the receipts and the things that come through. It's a good idea to turn those pop-ups on on your phone.

So you know when your credit card's been accessed, your bank account's been accessed, any of those things have been accessed. And if you have a partner, don't be afraid to send a message to your partner, hey, was this you? Because that's how my wife and I figured out that that stuff was enough us with the Amazon piece. So now she gets a message from me all the time, was this you? She's like, yes. So, you know.

Jeremy (30:54)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

So have the uncomfortable

money conversation with your partner is what you're saying.

Jason Haworth (31:06)
Yeah,

I had the uncomfortable money conversation, but set up those alerts. Like, that's a big thing. Set up the alerts is a really big thing. The other piece that I think is actually really, really helpful is kind of as you're going through and you're reading your credit card statements and you're trying to understand what they look like, most of us have a tendency to not write down our credit card purchases, because we don't know, right?

So we just look at things, we're like, yep, I did that, yep, I was at that store, I was at that store. There are certain things that are staples in your area that people buy and that we know certain things happen and we know certain store patterns emerge and occur. If you are looking at your credit card statements or you're looking at your purchase statements and you start to see things happen, especially in your local area at a higher rate than what you're used to seeing,

Start having those trigger flags pop up. Start looking for those component pieces. A really, really common technique is that you'll actually get RFID'd or swiped by somebody with a reader in their credit card while you're walking by. And it's somewhat in your neighborhood. ⁓ Somewhere where you shop, where you go to. And if you start seeing things pop up like that, don't just look at the city or the state where the purchase is. Look at the store name. Look at what was there. Look at the dollar figure. Check this stuff. It happens all the time.

just kind of being aware of those things isn't enough. You actually have to dig in and look at it. And none of us wanted to be forensic accountants. Like none of us signed up for this shit. because we get so much free shit from all these wonderful companies that just want to manipulate our data, this is the price that you have to pay.

Jeremy (32:40)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's a good place to end it. Lots of great advice there. And I think it will definitely, I we will definitely keep tabs on this because this is only gonna get harder. This is only gonna get worse as the technology evolves and it truly does become automated.

More to come, but definitely protect yourself. Take our advice, look for more advice, and do whatever it takes to keep your online health safe so that your mental health doesn't have to suffer as a result. You can find some of these resources at our website, robots.me, and that's where we'll be back next week, next Monday morning with a brand new episode. Thanks so much for listening.

Jason Haworth (33:13)
Exactly.

Thanks everyone. Bye.