Cyber Punk’d

Today’s blog image is taken from a tutorial video that Olive was sending to an online hacker posing as a childhood friend. Over a three day period Olive’s friend Celia was excited to invite Olive to try SnapChat Pro, an improvement on the conventional SnapChat. 

It simply required a trick to use at the apple store to send the $100 gift card to her email address. 

“Don’t worry, it does not actually charge you $100 ‘fake’ Celia promised”.

Fortunately, family communication and password protection foiled this attempt at accessing our apple account, and all the associated information.

Olive’s embarrassment at her own ‘stupidity’ was upsetting, even though the level of deception involved with this techno-trickery would have duped most adults.

This event taught a very cheap, and powerful lesson in online security. 

If you are not face to face, there is very little way to validate identity in our current world.

I’m not advocating fear mongering, or becoming a luddite.

Rather I am celebrating the importance of sharing these scams and ‘near-misses’.

Learning from mistakes is how we grow, and when we can learn from the mistakes of others, even better. I’m grateful that this time we got a freebie.

• Now that’s a peak ethos.