“You want to have strong passwords and multi factor authentication for your email accounts,” said Agent Sohn. One of the big lessons shared was how hackers are not attacking the server side, such as banks or “Gmail / Yahoo” but the “human” side. “Once they trick you into entering your password, they can control everything.”

An additional tip was to ensure that all security questions to reset a password are private and specific. One example given was a corporation that had a security password question asking “What is the name of the CEO?” which was readily available on the internet.

The biggest surprise of the evening was Agent Sohn discussing a new real estate scam, where fake escrow instructions are sent to the buyer causing them to wire monies to a criminal enterprise. “The email will appear to be real, because the hackers have stolen the escrow company email account but directed the funds to where they want it to go. In these cases, the banks will not make the victim whole,” said Agent Sohn.

Detective Jimmy Federico from the SVPD Detective Bureau also provided valuable information about the investigative processes, and how large companies gather private information, mine it and sell it at a level that government could never envision. “Once they have the information that is pertinent to a crime victim, they are reluctant to share it with law enforcement and that delays the resolution of our investigations,” Federico said.

The FBI recommends reporting cyber crime victimization to the IC3 website at www.ic3.gov where it is monitored 24 hours per day. The FBI does not investigate all instances of cyber crime.

The Simi Valley Police Department wants to remind everyone who uses a computer to follow these important tips and “harden the target” to criminals. Current data tells us that using strong passwords, multi-factor authentication and good security questions literally stop hackers from being able to commit these horrible crimes.

The Simi Valley Police Department will offer this class again sometime later this calendar year and will post on Facebook and Twitter prior to the class.

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