Phishing, Scamming, and Hacking: Another Epidemic This Year

Just about a year ago, on 17 June 2019, our weekly blog addressed the issue of protecting yourself online. At that time, many of us were being inundated with phony emails asking for money, gift cards, and the phony "rescuing" of friends in need. That blog post lists ways you can protect yourself and we hope you will click on the link at the end of this post to refresh your memory on ways you can stay safe. All of those hints are still quite useful.

During the past few weeks, another, and potentially more serious, online epidemic has struck, and that is the hacking of popular websites, including several major genealogy sites. The crime spree seems to have begun on Wednesday, 15 July 2020, when the Twitter accounts of prominent people including celebrities, billionaire business leaders, politicians, and others were hijacked by hackers who used the platform to push a scam involving bitcoin, an online currency. The tweets that were posted on each account were identical; they asked for people to send bitcoin to a link with a promise that they would receive double the amount in return. Yes, it looked suspicious, but it fooled enough people to generate more than $100,000 before the fake tweets were removed.

Just a few days later, the genealogy world began to suffer attacks by hackers. First, the DNA site called GEDmatch was breached on 19 July. A post on GEDmatch's Facebook page revealed that hackers had accessed the site's user permissions and for approximately three hours, "users who did not opt in for law enforcement matching were available for law enforcement matching and, conversely, all law enforcement profiles were made visible to GEDmatch users." The post continued by assuring people that "no user data was downloaded or compromised." As GEDmatch tech support worked on fixing the security breach, they discovered more vulnerable spots, and they finally shut down the whole website until they could patch the holes. The site is back up and running now.

Apparently, however, the GEDmatch people were incorrect in saying no user data was stolen, as just a few days later, the Israel-based MyHeritage site announced that email addresses of some of its users were taken from GEDmatch and were being used in a phishing scheme to steal login information. The emails sent by the hackers contained a home page graphic that was identical to the real MyHeritage login page, EXCEPT it went to a phony site called MyHeritaqe, and it lured unsuspecting people to enter their user names and passwords before it was shut down.

Meanwhile, over at Ancestry.com, another security breach caused them to issue a warning to users of Family Tree Maker software. Ancestry gave up ownership of its software division some time ago, but a Ukranian company called MacKiev continues to produce both Mac and PC versions of Family Tree Maker, and many who use it regularly sync their files to their Ancestry trees. One of the company's servers had a faulty misconfiguration that opened it to hackers and the data that was stolen contained email addresses and user locations, among other things, and was not encrypted for safety.

Why is this all so important? As we place more of our genealogy files, photos, and stories online, we need to constantly stay vigilant about their safety. We also need to remind ourselves frequently that clicking on links that arrive in our email is extremely dangerous unless we are absolutely sure of who sent them. You can take steps to protect yourself:

1. Always be sure your passwords are strong, and, if any website that you log into is compromised in any way, change your password immediately. In both the Twitter and GEDmatch heists, hackers gained access by using current active accounts.
   
2. Whenever you have the option, use two-step (two-factor) authentication. You can read more about what this is and how to set it up in one of our previous blog posts.
3. Be super-careful about what you click. If in doubt, just don't! Read our blog from last June to see a list of recommendations for creating passwords and staying safe.
4. If you are storing files in the cloud, be sure the site you are using has encryption so your files are protected from tampering or theft. Even if encrypted data is stolen, it cannot be interpreted and used.
   

For more information:

"Who's Behind Wednesday's Epic Twitter Hack?" KrebsonSecurity.com, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/07/whos-behind-wednesdays-epic-twitter-hack/, 20 July 2020.

Judy G. Russell, “GEDmatch Security Breach,” The Legal Genealogist, https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog, 21 July 2020.

Peter Aldhous, "A Security Breach Exposed More Than One Million DNA Profiles on a Major Genealogy Database," BuzzFeed News, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/hackers-gedmatch-dna-privacy, 22 July 2020.

Elizabeth Montalbano, "Leak Exposes Private Data of Genealogy Service Users," ThreatPost, https://threatpost.com/leak-exposes-private-data-of-genealogy-service-users/157612/, 22 July 2020.