I'm a nobody; why would anyone want to hack me?

Episode 2 of the Your Secure Life podcast.

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Hey, welcome to the Your Secure Life podcast.

My name is Garrett. I'm an OSINT investigator and a privacy consultant and I am here to teach individuals and small businesses about privacy and security.

That's what this whole podcast about.

You can check it out at YourSecure.Life, and don't forget to pick up our free guide YourSecure.Life/guide, which will tell you how to clean up and keep clean your digital footprint in five days or less.

This week we're talking about why hackers want to hack you.

I talk to a lot of people who tell me things like "no one would want to hack me; I'm a nobody."

The fact of the matter is that it doesn't matter who you are.

You might be a nobody. You might be a somebody, and of course you have a higher chance of being hacked if you are somebody, but if you're not somebody there's still a good chance you could be hacked.

We're going to talk about why.

The first thing I want to go over is , the term "hacking," I'm going to be using that in a way that means "cybercrime".

A lot of people take issue with this. It's fine. I don't even like to use it. It's not a catch-all term. You can be a hacker and not do any crime.

You can be a criminal and not do any hacking. They're not interchangeable.

There's a difference between cybercrime hacking and regular hacking. Just like there's a difference between locksmithing and picking locks to break in.

You can hire a locksmith because you got locked out of your car and you need to get back into your car. That's totally legal and there's no crime involved and it's ethical.

But that same person could use those same tools and those same skills to break into cars and steal stereos or other valuables.

It's the same thing with hacking.

There are tools there are skills that could be used for good. They could be used for evil.

But in this podcast, we're going to be using the term hacking to refer to cybercriminals attacking you. Most likely for identity theft.

The first and most obvious reason why someone would get hacked, why you would get hacked, is if you have money.

One of the funniest things that I have to deal with when talking to people is that the the more money someone has, for some reason, the more likely they are to tell me "I'm a nobody; why would anybody hack me?"

I just look at them like they've got a second head or something.

It just blows my mind that someone who drives a Tesla and lives in a three-story house on the water in Florida doesn't think that someone would come after their money.

I don't really think there's anything else to say about this one. It's pretty obvious.

If you have money people are going to come after you.

Another reason that you might be hacked as if you have a good credit score.

Cybercriminals want people with good credit scores to steal their identity.

It's really easy to take out a large, sometimes six-figure, loan online without talking to anybody. Just by submitting information.

If they can steal your identity and submit that information, get a huge hundred thousand dollar loan, and take off... That sucks for you.

If you have a good credit score, even just a mediocre credit score, this could happen to you and it could happen with credit cards, too.

You don't even have to have a lot of money to have a good credit score.

I know plenty of people that have great credit scores and make well below six figures. I've been there myself.

Speaking of identity theft, identity theft on average costs $7,000 and at least a hundred hours of time just to clean up.

You really don't want to open yourself to identity theft, right? That's why you're here, of course. That's why you're listening to this.

Another possibility is that you were randomly chosen. It's true. You can be randomly chosen to be hacked.

The way this works is because of all of the past data breaches where all of our information has been leaked out.

That's why I advocate for such strong privacy and our own lives and in the corporations that are taking our data. And I guess the governments, too.

What happens is these databases get leaked and sometimes they have our password. Sometimes they have our user names. Sometimes they have our emails.

Let's suppose in one of these leaked breaches your email and password were in the database and that same email and that same password is used for your email or Facebook or maybe even your bank account.

They now have access to that.

Cyber criminals have built software that just takes these databases, scours the internet, and just starts pluging it in until it finds positives.

You definitely want to have different passwords.

I talk about that in the guide at YourSecure.Life/guide.

Day one talks about how you should manage your passwords and how you should have a different password for every website.

So go check that out. It's free.

There's this thing called "doxxing" or "getting doxxed" and what that means is someone's got your address and they blasted it online.

Usually this is used for harassment purposes.

These people obviously aren't trying to steal your identity or get any financial gain out of you, but they are trying to mess up your life and in many cases they succeed.

So why would someone want to docks and harass you?

Unfortunately, we live in a very volatile times specially politically and especially when it comes to politics online.

You could say the wrong thing and piss off the wrong person. It's really that simple.

They don't even have to be one of your friends. If you post it publicly you could say something on Twitter and someone just happens to find it and they're just the wrong person and they happen to decide, "you know, what I'm going to ruin this person's day."

The next thing you know, you've got a SWAT team beating down your door because they called the police and told them that you had a bomb.

That's called "swatting" and it happens more often than you think.

A less nefarious prank that is often done is that they just send pizzas to your front door. This might sound good at first, but when you have 10, no sauce, no cheese left beef pizzas, it's not good. It's not good at all.

Another reason you might be a target is because you're not the actual target, someone close to you is, and you don't want to be their weak link.

For example, let's say your husband is the one who said something on Twitter to piss off some trolls.

Now those trolls are looking for him. But he is way ahead of the game. He's way ahead of me. He's already wiped out all information about himself online and so he can't be found.

But this person, they found you.

And they know that you live with him. And they find your address because you didn't clean it up.

This is why it's important that you are secure. You have to be secure for the people around you.

That's called herd immunity and that's why I do what I do here. It's because I want everyone to be safe so that we can all be safe together and it helps all of us.

Again, don't be someone else's weak link.

The last reason I want to talk about someone would want to hack you is because you are putting yourself online.

This could be in very different ways. It could be because you're an online entrepreneur and you want to be like Gary Vee. It could be because you are a Twitch streamer and you want to be like PewDiePie.

I guess he's on YouTube, but maybe you want to be a YouTube person.

It doesn't matter. They will come after you just for that.

Some of it might be jealousy. Some of it's just trolls trying to harass you.

The fact is that if you put yourself online like that, people are gonna try to get at you just for whatever stupid reason.

And that's another reason you need to be safe.

In fact, a lot of people that have been online, especially Twitch and YouTube, have been swatted, doxxed, all of that.

It really sucks and it's really scary.

But there's a lot of things we can do to prevent it from happening and that's what this whole podcast is about.

It's a scary world out there these days. Very little could set someone off and have them come after you.

It's terrible. It sucks. It really does, and here we are living that life. It's what we got to do.

That's what this whole podcast is about. That's why I put together a free guide.

I know I'm plugging it a lot today, but I forgot to plug it last episode. I think or I plugged it very little last episode. I might not have even plugged it. I don't remember, but I just want to make sure you know about YourSecure.Life/guide. It's free.

You can take it as a 5-day email course, or you can take it all in one day. You can knock it all out in a Saturday for sure.

This stuff really is like the bare minimum and we're just getting started with this podcast.

This is episode 2, so it's just the beginning, but I'm here working to make sure that everybody can be safe online.

Not just me, not just you, but everybody.

Because like I said earlier, there's that herd immunity. If each of us take precautions to be safer, it helps all of us in the long.

Run next episode we're going to talk about another common thing that I hear: "I don't need privacy because I have nothing to hide."

That one pisses me off even more, and it should piss you off too.

But this is it for today. Let's talk about that one next week.

If you want to check out the show notes or the transcript or even a video of this, you can go to YourSecure.Life/2 because this is episode 2. Slash one has episode 1 and I think slash zero has the introduction episode.

Either way, you can find them all from there. You can also just go to YourSecure.Life and you can figure it out from there, I'm pretty sure.

This podcast has no sponsors. It's never going to have sponsors because I hate commercials.

I pretty much only listen to podcast when I'm driving and it just really sucks to have a really long commercial when I am driving because I don't want to look down to skip it and then I have to listen to this commercial.

So that's why I don't have commercials.

I don't ever want to have commercials.

So the best way that you can support this is you can share it with somebody.

You can search for this on iTunes if you're not listening on iTunes and give us a review there, that would be great. And also a subscribe.

Of course on YouTube, you can like and subscribe the video to help and really just any sort of sharing helps.

I greatly appreciate it. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next week.

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Sometimes stuff pulls the wool over our eyes and gets us. Sometimes our information gets out there other ways (like through breaches). We can minimize the damage with just a few actions. Get the free 5 step guide to clean up your digital footprint.