Digital Lockdown
Habits For Securing Your Mobile Devices
The amount of personal information that can be mined from the average iPhone 4 or Android is enough to completely clone a person’s identity. They reveal whom you’re texting, and with what frequency (often with reviewable transcripts). They are most often linked to email accounts bearing personal and financial correspondence with no password required for whomever picks up the device to access the email. Personal Banking Apps store online IDs if not passwords. Social Networking Apps automatically store passwords for your “convenience” and never require them again unless you actively log out.
In short any person or organization that gains physical access to your mobile device will have full access to your entire life for the duration of time that it remains in their possession.
Most consider that securing your device with a simple four-digit passcode on its automatic lock enough to ensure a relatively acceptable level of security. This is not so.
Many people (women in particular) pride themselves on hacking these passwords and surveilling your most intimate personal information. This is usually motivated out of a deep-seated sense of insecurity based on past experiences in which this exercise has been carried out on other romantic liaisons in the past, the results of which caused enough conflict to end the relationship. Badly.
To counter this kind of misguided hacking, two simple steps can be taken to secure your device and ensure that this is very nearly impossible.
Change your general settings on the device to ensure that the “autolock” is disabled, requiring you to actively secure the device manually.
Establish a daily pattern of employing a “book cypher.”
Book Cyphers
A book cypher was one of the most common means of encryption employed by the Founding Fathers to pass encoded messages between each other and potential allies that could aid the American cause in Britain securely. The “technology” developed by Franklin was based on a predetermined number of pages alternating at a random pattern throughout the pages of a specific volume of the text.
For our purposes, it’s necessary to choose a text, hidden in plain sight. This might be at your place of business, kept in your vehicle or it might be a part of your personal library.
It’s usually enough to just start at the beginning of your chosen text and translate the letters of each new word with more than seven letters into your new passcode each day at the appointed time.
For instance, take the famous quote by Manly P. Hall:
“Secret Societies have existed among all peoples, savage and civilized, since the beginning of recorded history.”
Example:
Your four-digit passcodes for the week, if this were your cypher would then be:
- Monday/Secret – 7327
- Tuesday/Societies - 7624
- Wednesday/have - 4283
- Thursday/existed - 3947
- Friday/among - 2666
- Saturday/peoples - 7367
- Sunday/savage - 7282
Habits For Securing Your Personal Computer
Password Protection
It goes without saying that you need a password to protect sensitive information when you leave it sleeping for any amount of time, but without the habit of actively engaging this feature to prompt the user for the password it’s not effective. If you’re not already in the habit, until you’ve internalized the habit of locking the screen each and every time you get up from the workstation, place a stickynote where you normally use the device with a meme to remind you.
Research in the field has shown that, just as some females pride themselves on their ability to “hack” passwords by observing keystrokes the opportunity can be taken to take a quick tour of your most visited sites as soon as you get up to get something from the kitchen or resign yourself to the restroom to relieve yourself while company is present.
Lock down the machine and force yourself to get into the habit of presenting that kind of temptation.
Also, to prevent the observation hack from leaving your machine vulnerable, opt for one with biological verification like a finger scanner, or, if that option is unavailable, apply the book code technique used to secure your mobile device.
Can I check my email?
Another great opportunity some will attempt to exploit is to attempt to crack into the sites where you’ve got a saved password. While it is best practice to NEVER allow others access to the machine. Denying what would otherwise be a benign favor to ask of a romantic liaison, denying the request raises suspicion and incites the observation hack.
Instead, take the time to set up an additional account for guest users with a simple password that does not change. This segregates the browser history from the partitioned account that you use for “business” and allows forensic analysis later.
Was the cache and history cleared when you logged back in after she left? It may indicate something is amiss. If not, it’s an excellent metric to guage the honesty of whomever uses the guest account, for whatever reason you see as relevant.
