A life lived in digital

A couple months back I was planting some bulbs outside along the driveway. I’m hoping I might see these things spring to life in a few months, but I won’t hold my breath.
Anyhow, it wasn’t until hours later, when I was back inside, exhausted and thinking about dinner, that I realized my phone was nowhere to be found. My husband had gone to the store and when he came back I asked if he could help me find my phone. No dice…until the next morning when he recalled hearing a strange ‘clunk-clunk’ sound as he drove away. “Oh yes,” I recalled then. “I set the phone on the hood of my car.”
So we took a walk and sure enough, there in a pile of curb leaves four blocks away sat the thin, plastic backing scratched up pretty well and no “guts” in sight. Miraculously someone found the guts a few weeks after that and turned it into the PD. The kind police officers called “Mom,” who then called me. And that’s how I eventually found my phone.
In the interim it gave me a jolt to think about how much of my life was locked inside that stupid little hunk of plastic. Maybe not items of national security, but enough to make me uneasy.
There’s plenty of cause for concern when life is fast becoming so very digital. A mobile device can harbor a great deal of information—and risk. We bank online, keep memories and communications online, we work, we play, and we even open ourselves up to criminal activity. This sentiment was echoed at the International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS) this past January, where cyber crime experts in government, private industry and acidemia expressed concern that security measures and education need to somehow keep up—if not keep ahead—of a rapidly increasing number of cyber schemes.
For example, police in Tennessee were recently alerted to a ransom ware scam where hackers took control of mobile devices and uploaded child pornography images that victims were then unable to delete. The extortion scheme includes a list of U.S. criminal statute codes and offers to “take care of this” for $500 (via an untraceable method of currency, of course).
Tennessee police instructed victims not to pay, as there was no guarantee hackers would unlock the phone. They then went on to share with the community ways they could protect themselves from future ransom ware attacks.
While some agencies have the luxury of setting up high-tech crime labs, it’s not feasible for everyone. Still, it’s not a bad idea to have at least one computer-savvy officer at the department to research and consult on all things IT.
And if the brunt of your agency’s smartphone complaints is merely tied up in missing, mishandled, and found phones, take pity on a poor soul for this sort of thing (unfortunately) happens all the time.  ■