Feorlen's Other Blog

So that happened.

I’ve, of course, considered such services for a long time. My first serious identity theft episode (besides credit cards) was about 15 years ago, when I was informed by my mortgage loan officer that I would not be getting that top-tier rate we had previously discussed.

There were items sent to collections I had never heard of. Addresses reported where I had not lived. There was an unscrupulous collections agency who took my report of fraud, attached to their record the full correct contact info they required me to give them, and submitted it again to the credit agencies as valid.

Among other things, the thieves signed up for local telephone service. But the phone company had No Earthly Idea where they might be located and apologized that they would be unable to help me on that issue, Thank You And Have A Nice Day. A police department in a state I never lived in refused to accept a report except in person. I couldn’t get anyone to tell me if the drivers license number on one of the credit applications meant someone applied for one in my name. My own state and local authorities wanted nothing to do with it, because the visible crime happened elsewhere. “You could try calling the FBI, but they are only interested in cases over a million dollars.”

At one point, when I was having a rather convoluted “discussion” with one of the credit bureaus, I offered to come to their office with paper copies of documents supporting my request to remove the fraudulent items. The main corporate office was ten minute’s walk from my workplace. They offered to call the police if explored that possibility.

This took several years to fully clean up, continuing even after I moved to California. I still have to assume that my personal information is sitting out there, waiting for someone else to abuse it. For all practical purposes, I have a lifetime subscription to credit reports on demand.

So let’s just say I’ve gotten pretty good at this. It’s a giant pain in the ass, but not enough to pay someone a monthly fee for the rest of my life (and probably after.) Particularly when the services available consisted of little more than automated credit report checking. Once in a while something happens, I spend a few weeks arguing about it with various companies, and then it goes away. (Until next time.)

So what changed?

Well, you might have noticed I know a thing or two about computers. Keeping them safe and secure, to the best of my abilities and time available. You would not be surprised to learn that I like backups. Backups! Backups as far as the eye can see! Backups that run hourly. Backups that are swapped out whenever something has the slightest suggestion of a hardware blip. Backups that live in my travel bag. Backups that live at my mother’s house. And backups that live in my car.

My usual “offsite backup” stays in the car glovebox. Every so often, I try for at least monthly, I take it inside and refresh it. We do have a storage unit, I could keep it there, but it’s far less convenient. That means it would be updated less often, and monthly is already not that great.

My laptop backup is encrypted, as are all of my USB hard drives if possible. My server backup is one of those that is not, because the OS version is too old. So my glovebox backup is one USB drive with two volumes, one encrypted and one not.

The unencrypted server backup always concerns me a bit. If someone knowledgable got it, it has all the information necessary to royally screw with my server. That’s a problem. But eventually that server will be going away, replaced with something better. And it’s a basic machine that runs a few websites and processes my outbound email. (I haven’t hosted my own inbox in years.) Yeah, having some archived files of ancient email released would not be fun. But that’s the extent of anything that would impact my actual personal life.

I’d rather not have my backup drive stolen out of the car, sure. It would be annoying, both for the car and having to lock down my server. But it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

So that’s not it, what else? (I’m guessing, at this point, you have some idea that there will be a car chapter to this story.)

A few weeks ago, my spouse decided that this offsite backup thing wasn’t such a bad idea. The thought of having to use it, because the house burned down or all our stuff was stolen, is not pretty. But it’s better to have something in that situation than have nothing. And it’s not that difficult to remember to update and put back once in a while. So he did.

Given that he’s the inspiration for the “tinfoil hat” userpic I have on one of my social media accounts, I presumed it was encrypted. He has many years’ experience in professional system administration and is far, far more paranoid than I am. Nothing with a name or address is discarded intact. He insists the shredding goes to a facility where he can watch it being shredded. When I moved to California, he would not use the cheap 900 MHz cordless phone I brought with me because it was insecure. He doesn’t like my passwords because sometimes I have to choose ones that are capable of being manually typed within two or three tries.

Guess what. Oops.

A few days ago, someone broke into our car and ransacked the glovebox. The only things taken were a small bag of charging cables and two hard drives, mainly because there was nearly nothing else to be had. (This is, by far, not my first rodeo.) Car documents, paper napkins, and some random receipts were scattered about.

One of those hard drives is my spouse’s unencrypted laptop backup.

First I dealt with the immediate problem of filing a police report, which took about 20 minutes on the phone. It is a process that is at least highly efficient, since it is almost certainly useless in getting our stuff back or even in identifying a suspect. But to be able to discuss this with my insurance company, it needed to be done.

Then came the discussion on what, exactly, was on that hard drive: it’s a copy of his user directory. So it didn’t contain system passwords, but that was about the only good thing that could be said. He uses a password manager for many things, but it’s not possible to protect everything that way. Years of email, confidential documents, client project details, credit card statements, tax returns, the medical documents I needed him to scan for me while I was out of town. All there. I handle most of the household finances, so a great many more items are instead on my machine. But sometimes you have to share, and things get passed around.

It’s almost certain that the thief didn’t care about the data. But wherever those drives get dumped, or whoever they are sold to, somebody very easily could. Names, addresses past and present, names and addresses of family members, birth dates, social security numbers, financial account numbers, everything necessary to utterly ruin our financial lives.

I’ll have more to say in other posts: which service I chose, what happened with the car, and how this story develops. But that explains why now, after many years of not being impressed with paid monitoring services, I now have forked over my money for one.