Have you safely stored a list of your digital contacts?

[razz]

A good friend just got hacked.

Due to her volunteer activities on a critical issue, she has or had built a list of 900 contacts. She quickly got help from knowledgeable computer support but they watched all the emails and contact list disappearing. The support tried to stop this and reverse the loss but the hackers caught onto that quickly and moved to another type of attack and the emails disappeared more quickly.
I received an email using her name with a simple appeal for help from the hacker. She had texted me about the hack so I simply deleted that email. Apparently, she has been receiving phone calls about this appeal for help from many of the contacts verifying the request which has been so stressful.

It seems that she does not have a master list of her contacts. It is totally devastating all her efforts.

Do you maintain a list of your contacts outside your computer or safe from hackers?

[Gardnr]

Do you maintain a list of your contacts outside your computer or safe from hackers?

Daily backup of my entire hard drive. Everyone should do this if you have documents you can't replicate.

[Teacher Terry]

No but I don’t but I don’t have a lot of them.

[Alan]

When I retired I printed out my rather extensive work contact list which I also used for personal contacts. I've kept that hard copy in case I need them later but have no updated hard copy of personal contacts, although I do have them stored on two different cloud servers, Google and iCloud.

[iris lilies]

I back up all my documents that I would care about losing every time I make an update.


But for Contacts? No. I do not have a back up of contact file.


I will say that for the important email contacts because I maintain membership lists, those would be easy to spin off from the XL files where they reside. But yeah it would definitely be a pain if all my contacts disappeared.

[Tradd]

I have a written list of contacts.

[Rogar]

I've printed out a list of my digital contacts and stored in a file cabinet. I could do better about backing up files elsewhere. Does your friend happen to know how she was hacked?

[razz]

One of her advisers looked into it and it seems to come from Nigeria but we have not talked at length about it as her house phone is going nuts with calls. She won't be able to use the contacts linked between her cell phone and iPad as they are gone.

I feel really badly for her as she was the driving force to get the issue going, spent so many hours over the past 4 years building the contact list and the relationships with them to share the info updates and support. All those emails are all gone.

[Gardnr]

A good friend just got hacked.

Do you maintain a list of your contacts outside your computer or safe from hackers?

You don't get hacked without an action on your part. She either clicked on a link in an email she shouldn't have, or clicked into a website she shouldn't have.

This comment comes from a cybersecurity officer.

[razz]

With so many contacts in her devices and communicating with them with updates both sending and receiving, it is very possible that one contact was compromised and she clicked into a shared link.
I am naive about hacking so have a protected password vault with Keeper Security and avoid most links unless I trigger the contact. I use Gmail as one of my emails and it is apparently quite protective re spam etc.

[Simplemind]

My volunteer organization does not allow us to store clients numbers or other volunteers numbers. It is very very rare that we are allowed to give out our own. It often frustrates me because when I'm on call I have to answer any number that comes up because it could be from another member. Pain in the *ss but we can't get hacked either.

[jp1]

My phone backs up to iCloud every night when I plug it in.

[razz]

My phone backs up to iCloud every night when I plug it in.

I am very naive about this as I said, so does the daily back up automatically protect the info, contacts and emails on phone, from hackers? Does the hacker's compromising effort reach into the cloud storage?

[iris lilies]

My phone backs up to iCloud every night when I plug it in.
oh right! I forgot about icloud backups.doh.

[Teacher Terry]

I am guessing my iPhone does the same.

[razz]

My iPhone is set to back up each night as well. Why would it not back up the problem that the hacker inserted as well? My lack of understanding of the possibilities of problems created by hackers is obvious.

[jp1]

The icloud backup is not an identical copy of everything on your phone. It backs up all your data (emails, imessages, photos, contact list) and a list of all your apps but not the apps themselves. If you wipe and restore your phone to factory settings, or purchase a new one, and then log in to icloud from it, the apps will all get reinstalled from the app store and then your data gets repopulated into the phone.

It sounds like the OP's friend's problem involved a regular computer, not a phone. The same basic solution would also likely work (wipe the harddrive and reinstall everything from scratch and then restore just the data from a backup) but would require that the contents had been backed up prior to the problem. Unfortunately a lot of people still don't routinely back up their personal computers. Depending on what email system they use perhaps the emails still exist on the email provider's system? For example I use gmail. If my computer gets destroyed my email still lives on on gmail's server. What was on the computer is just a copy.

[razz]

Did some more research on how secure the info on our phones really is and was surprised - not very. It may be ver.y difficult to know just what and where the hack actually came from if I am understanding what I am reading. Sounds as though turning off one's device if not in use is best :(


Some interesting sites to explore.

https://spyic.com/phone-hack/how-to-hack-a-phone/
https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/consumer/how-do-hackers-hack-phones-and-how-can-i-prevent-it/
Older article:https://www.wired.com/story/imessage-interactionless-hacks-google-project-zero/ but it shows the problems with iMessage and the need to keep updating your device ASAP.

ETA: thanks,jp1, for the additional info. I know that she primarily used her iPad which is linked to her phone and does not own a computer other than those two devices.

[Alan]

I know that she primarily used her iPad which is linked to her phone and does not own a computer other than those two devices.The two devices aren't actually linked together, but rather they're both linked to her iCloud account and the data stored there.

It occurs to me that if her contacts and emails were deleted from one of the devices, they should be recoverable by doing a restore from backup, that is if both devices are routinely backed up to iCloud. That's not an absolute fix due to the fact that backups are highly configurable. If her iCloud settings did not include backup of emails and contacts they may be lost forever.

If it were me, I'd probably reset both devices to their factory defaults then log back into the iCloud account and perform a restore from the latest backup and hope for the best. Although I suppose that if the latest backup was completed after the emails and contacts were deleted from one of the devices, they would no longer be available from the cloud either.

[SteveinMN]

What Alan said.

I have iCloud backup and perform two local backups of my phone (I don't have a tablet) regularly, to my laptop and to an off-site external drive. Everything has a strong password (including iCloud) and I don't click on links in emails unless I'm absolutely sure of where they came from. Ditto for DW when I can get her to comply. ;)

[rosarugosa]

Don't laugh, but I have info for all my contacts written down in a little book, just like people did in the olden days. :)

[iris lilies]

Don't laugh, but I have info for all my contacts written down in a little book, just like people did in the olden days. :)
And here I was just thinking boy I really need to sit down with my electronic contacts file and add tons of stuff to it.


I still keep the hardcopy address book around and will probably have it until I die. But I don’t know what it really accomplishes most of the time.


Our little neighborhood is undergoing fierce debate at the board level to get rid of our printed neighborhood directory. It lists someone’s name, their address, their phone number. Because it is a self reporting tool, much of it is outdated or in accurate. New people to the neighborhood, those under the age of 40, don’t understand why it exists. The people who have been around for decades clutch it as a lifeline.


I myself pick it up about every other week, but more than half the time what I want to know is not contained there. So many landlines have been cut! Plus no one has bothered to review it in years so it’s contains information about our neighborhood as a whole that is not accurate.