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the phone and follow up directly with the IRS to articles from news media / Internet, information you
find out if there is a legitimate problem, and how it receive at our LCACE meetings and elsewhere.
can be resolved.) Cyber-security challenges will be with us forever,
and the bad guys are smart and creative. We must
Speaking of taxes and the IRS, there is a growing be knowledgeable, disciplined and vigilant if we are
scam that targets businesses. (The bad news is to remain safe!
that the consequences of this scam affect individ-
uals!) In this scam, “spear-phishing” emails are On a separate note, I have been asked to give my
sent to employees who work in HR, designed to recent presentations on Cyber-Security and Digital
look as though they were sent by high-level exec- Afterlife at the Waukegan Township Park Place Sen-
utives in the company. In these emails, the HR ior Center in November and December. For those
employees are ordered to send copies of current who were not able to attend one or both of those
year W-2s for employees to their “boss” by return LCACE presentations you are welcome to attend the
email, for a confidential research project. coming presentations at the Senior Center. The
Cyber-Security presentation will be at 1:00pm on
The special email address provided in the email is Wednesday, November 29 ; the Digital Afterlife
th
of course bogus; If the low-level HR recipients are presentation will be at 1:00 pm on Wednesday, De-
afraid to challenge the “boss” who supposedly cember 13 . The Senior Center is located at 414 S.
th
requested the W-2’s, they may be sent as or- Lewis Avenue, Waukegan.
dered. Armed with names, Social Security num-
bers and actual pay / withholding information, the Have a great Thanksgiving!
bad guys can now file bogus income tax returns
in your name and have your refund sent to them.

I haven’t seen a good countermeasure for this,
since individual employees have no way of know-
ing that this is going on until they file their legiti-
mate tax returns and have them rejected by the
IRS. However, the IRS is aware of this problem
and presumably is taking steps to identify and
investigate questionable returns.

Moving to the larger problem of massive ongoing
data breaches….. As discussed at our October
meeting, these breaches typically put your logon
credentials at risk – for emails, for financial ac-
counts and so on. Bad guys can use them to do Our October meeting was conducted by Phil Bock.

lots of bad things – clean out your bank account, The door prize was won by Fred Barnett. He won a 16
enlist your email account in one of their botnets, GB, 3.0 USB thumb drive.
and so on. This makes it very important for you
to consider two-factor authentication (2FA)! As DeBorah Sirilla won the 50/50 raffle, she and the
one cyber-security article put it, “2FA makes your club each receiving $12.00.
passwords worthless to cyber thieves”.
Congratulations to all prize winners!
This can be a minor annoyance when you log-in
from an unfamiliar computer for the first time, be- Thanks to Phil Bock for making the coffee, and to Liz
Barnett who provided munchables for us.
cause you will be challenged to complete whatev-
er 2FA process you have established for the ac- This month's program was "Cyber-security update" by
count you are trying to access. But, the good our President, Phil Bock. Phil helped us in our ongoing
news is that you can complete the process and quest to stay on top of our cyber security issues. Thanks,
logon. The bad guy cannot. Just remember to again, Phil.
set up a unique password and 2FA process for
each account. Another great meeting, and I hope to see you at
If you haven’t already done so, I encourage you our November 11 meeting.

to set up a digital folder (or file folder) devoted to Lester Larkin
cyber-security, and use it to collect related emails, Club Historian

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