Gentle readers, I intended to continue the District Stones saga this morning, but the following from an old shipmate startled me enough to change the production schedule. For those of you affected by the OPM data hack (as are most of the folks I know), please read the following horror story. I have frozen all my credit reporting but vigilence is required. We are at war.

Here is what I received:

Vic,

My old email address and online files in the cloud were hacked five weeks ago by the Chinese. All of my files and emails going back 10+ years were deleted and then exploited.

When this happened on November 20th, I engaged in a three hour long online battle to regain control of the account and its data. I was able to do trace backs using a second computer and online dark web tools the individual(s) on the distant end.

I discovered this email account hack, that morning, when I found my email program had been logged off. When I tried to log back on, the error message said that my password was bad. When I dug into it to reset my password, I found that the new account name was no longer me but an “Alvie Bacon.” There is a single mention of this name online in the context of the word hacker in a fan fiction piece dated 2011. Back and forth I and this persona or more likely a script went taking control of the account. I wrote a script to do much the same but my computer was not as fast as his.

Suffice it to say that the dark web trace back tools I used while engaged in this back and forth are on certain sites that approved folks use/consult when doing the trace backs that I did.

The financial institution asked us to file charges with the local police. They sent me a form to fill out and send them and provide to the local police. Nothing like an 18th century snail mail report form in a real time 21st century cyber war, eh?

Be advised that any emails you have received from my old email address since November 20th and quite possibly before are suspect. Please do not open or send anything from/to that address going forward. You will likely be communicating with the hackers, or Unit

Two weeks ago, thieves tried to secure debit cards to my credit union accounts. They were delivered overnight. We became aware of this when our credit union sent emails to new email accounts that we had just created after November 20th for financial institutions to know/use. While we were on the phone with the company, the thieves tried to activate them. They were male and spoke in Spanish accented English. The delivery address was in Central Florida. We were able to frustrate this in the nick of time.

Per the institution the thieves called them on a Sunday and ordered the cards in my and my wife’s name. They had all the necessary passwords, driver license info and security question answer ducks in a line.

In the aftermath, it is unclear if the protection offered by OPM would have made up for the losses we would/could have suffered. The thieves could have looted more than $100K. Federal law would have made us whole, if it had been credit card fraud, but these were debit cards. We now have individual passwords for all over-the-phone account transactions with this institution.

The back story to this follows.

My security clearance investigative files were compromised in the Chinese hacks of the Office of Personnel Management systems during the past two years. These files contained sensitive personal and financial data going back to my birth and before given my father’s security clearances in the 40s. They included Social Security numbers, driver license information, financial institution account numbers, savings and stock holdings, family data, and interview transcripts. My, my wife’s, and my family’s financial account information that was compromised was voluminous not just due to the trigraph war reserve accesses I held but the government acquisition jobs I held when I filled out yearly forms with boatloads of financial info that most SF86 based investigations never collected.

Despite the online protection offered by the US government to the victims of these hacks and my own measures to include password changes and the use of anonymizer browsers, the above occurred without warning given the perpetrators ability to socially engineer my account data.

It is a brave new world out there. We are in a hot cyber war, regardless of what the USG says. Nation states, criminal organizations and individuals, and hacker groups and individuals are playing for keeps. The collateral damage here to me was minimal but shocking given the measures I have employed for years.

Any professional association newsgroups that suggest association with the intelligence or military communities are also vulnerable, since members are high value targets for the Chinese, Russian, Iranian, North Korean governments.

Merry Christmas/Happy New Year.

M.