Our view: We were 'phished'

Until it happens to you, your tendency is to live in denial and complacency.

“It won’t happen to me,” you tell yourself. And you continue to ignore all the urgings for preventative action. You don’t buy LifeLock for your online life; you keep your easy-to-decode password, the one with your birthdate combined with your name’s initials.

But it’s for real. A cyber scammer/thief almost got us Monday.

Thankfully, the result was only a wakeup call that has spurred us, finally, to action. But there’s a lesson in this incident for everyone. You know all of those commercials about identity theft and all of the news stories about cyber attacks and credit-card hackers? This is real.

Indeed it is. CBS’s “60 Minutes” made it all the more real this past Sunday in a segment called “What happens when you swipe your card?” Dave DeWalt, CEO of the cyber security company FireEye, said in an interview “97% of all companies are getting breached … Even the strongest banks in the world can’t spend enough money to solve this problem.”

The attempted theft on us started at 9:31 a.m. Monday when our company’s chief financial officer, Laura Keisacker, received an email (see top email in the box), requesting funds be wired. Keisacker was off from work Monday; she saw the email on her smartphone.

Monday was a busy day for Keisacker — attending to a 4-month-old and a 3-year-old, relatives from the Thanksgiving weekend and a seriously ill family member. Despite being off, she stays on call.

Not thinking much of the request at this point, Keisacker responded, asking for the details of who was to receive the money, account number and the bank information.

Two hours later, continuing to use the “Matt Walsh” email address, the crook sent all of the information to Keisacker, including the name of the recipient; name of the bank; bank address and phone; account and routing numbers; and the amount requested — $14,550.

Mind you, none of these emails between Keisacker and the alleged “Matt Walsh” actually passed through the real Matt Walsh’s email inbox. They were flowing back and forth between Keisacker and a cyber thief who, upon our research, could be identified as:

• [email protected]

• [email protected]

So even though Keisacker thought she was responding to the real “Matt Walsh” and “[email protected],” her emails actually were going to those two email addresses.

The real Matt Walsh had no idea this was occurring.

As our company’s technology and development manager, Adam Saah, explained, the fraud was the cyber equivalent of someone sending you a letter through the U.S. Postal Service, forging a name and asking you to send money to what appears to be a legitimate return address.

By 2:30 p.m., the scam came to an end. Keisacker composed an original email to be sent to the real Matt Walsh and to the Observer Media Group’s bank confirming details. When the real Matt Walsh read Keisacker’s email about wiring funds, the real Matt Walsh — surprised and alarmed — called Keisacker.

There was an impostor. The thief didn’t get the cash.

On further research, Saah, the IT expert, determined the cyber thief was routing his emails through Internet providers in Brisbane, Australia, and Mauritius, tiny islands off the eastern coast of Africa. A common practice, Saah says. Those places and Amsterdam are hotbeds of hackers, cyber thieves and “phishing,” which is the act of defrauding online someone of his financial information by posing as a legitimate company or person.

The thief was persistent. On Tuesday morning, he sent another email to Keisacker in the name of Matt Walsh to confirm whether the $14,550 had been wired (see above).

On inspection, the fake emails contained telltale signs of fraud — awkward wording and sentence structure; punctuation and grammar errors. Even so, sometimes these signs are easy to miss, particularly if the email is coming from a trusted source.

Moral of the story: Whenever you receive an email discussing money or accounts, turn your cyber-radar on immediately … And change your easy-to-detect passwords. Saah has 50 of them. One way of tracking them is writing a list on paper. If the power goes out, you’ve still got them. — MW

WATCH FOR SUSPICIOUS INDICATORS
• Spelling and bad grammar: Look for mistakes in spelling, grammar and punctuation.

• Beware of links in email: If a link in an email looks suspicious, don’t click on it. Rest your mouse (but don’t click) on the link to see if the address matches the link that was typed in the message. Often times you will see a string of cryptic numbers that look nothing like the company’s real web address. Cyber crooks often use Web addresses that resemble the names of well-known companies but are slightly altered.

• Fake threats: Cyber criminals often use threats that your security has been compromised or that your account would be closed if you didn’t respond to an email. Beware.

WHY WE HAVE THE MORAL RIGHT, DUTY TO OBLITERATE JIHADISTS
From Craig Biddle, editor of The Objective Standard, Oct. 9:

Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA and secretary of defense, says that defeating our enemies in the Middle East and North Africa “is going to take a long time.” How long? “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war,” Panetta predicts.

Whether the United States will be involved in this war for 30 years is an open question. But the notion that such a lengthy war is necessary is nonsense.

America has astoundingly sophisticated weaponry — combat drones, nuclear submarines, satellite surveillance, aircraft carriers, stealth bombers, GPS-guided missiles, bunker busters, thermobaric bombs and so on. We have the most intelligent, best trained, most competent soldiers and special operations forces on the planet. We can eliminate large cities in a matter of seconds. We can take over large countries in a matter of weeks, if not days. We can bring any enemy to its knees in short order — if we so choose.

So why accept a 30-year war? Why accept even a 30-week war?

The only reason Americans will accept a long war is that they have lost (or never gained) confidence in their right to defend themselves against those who seek to kill them. If we are to defeat this God-awful enemy and return to normal, jihad-free living in a reasonable amount of time, Americans must regain confidence in the fact that we have certain rights and that our government must use the full capacity of our military to protect these rights when foreign aggressors aim to violate them.

We have a moral right to live our lives free from “Allah’s will” or any such nonsense. We have a moral right to defend ourselves against those who have faith or “just know” that they should convert or kill us. We have a moral right to kill those who seek to kill us. In short, we have a moral right to life, liberty and self-defense.

Of course, few Americans would deny that we have such rights. Most would say we do. The problem is that saying we have these rights is not the same thing as knowing we have them. And knowing we have these rights is a precondition of confidently demanding that our government protect them …

… Americans who lack sufficient motivation to do the mental work necessary to grasp the source and nature of rights may find such motivation by looking at the things and people they love and by seriously considering what it would be like to lose them.

Look, for instance, at your life, your career, your goals, your (relative) freedom, your boyfriend or girlfriend, your husband or wife, your children or grandchildren. Are you willing to permit jihadists who are dead set on destroying your values and killing your loved ones (or worse) to continue their efforts toward that end?

These values are precisely what is at stake. These are the things and people we stand to lose so long as the U.S. government fails to end the jihadist assault. And the only way to get the government to end the assault as quickly as possible is to remind the government and all Americans who will listen that the government is legally required to protect our rights — moral rights we can prove we have. It’s that simple.
What’s terrifying is not that a man with Panetta’s political history and visibility says a 30-year war is necessary. What’s terrifying is that almost no Americans are properly challenging such assertions. Let’s change that.