directly with me from another email account with an address only slightly different—so subtle it was easy to miss. The hacker had left the thread of information about the horses’ vettings as originally written in Julie’s email and had changed the banking details to their own. Suddenly we realized we had wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to hackers! We also learned that the hackers had created a fictitious “Rebecca” email account posing as me. So I had been corre- sponding via email with the hacker thinking it was Julie, Egbert’s wife, and the hacker had been corresponding to Julie posing as me. I didn’t even know this degree of intru- sion into your email system was possible. I was dumbfounded. I had just sent hackers a huge sum of money that included funds from me and from two investors in my new horse. To make matters worse, my client had sent her money to them as well for her new horse. We were all in a state of shock.


Taking Action We each went to our banks immediately and filed fraud reports to flag the funds that we knew had arrived in Holland, in hopes the authorities could take action before the hacker wired the money off to Russia, China, Africa or wherever, never to be seen again. We both met with our local police in San Diego and filed reports with the FBI. Unfortunately, the FBI said they wouldn’t get involved unless the transaction was at least $3 million. Our purchases were in the six figures


but not in the millions. I called all of my insurance companies in hopes that my loss would be covered via my trainer’s insur- ance and I could at least pay my two investors back. Unfortu- nately they all said the same thing: “I’m so sorry, but this isn’t covered on your policy.” Oh my…. In the meantime, against the advice of some “techie”


friends, I continued to email my hacker, working to main- tain contact and to act as if we were none the wiser. I was hoping against hope that the money was still sitting in his or her bank in Holland. I told the hacker we wanted to go ahead and also purchase “the ZZ Top mare I tried for 500,000 euros and to please resend your bank details, address and phone number so we can send the wire ASAP.” The hacker responded immediately, telling me to wire the funds to a sister company in Hong Kong “since it took so long for the first wire to come through” and giving me a whole new set of wiring instructions. I played along…strung them along… tried to keep them interested. As you can imagine, none of us slept that night. I called


Egbert every hour from 1 am on. He had called the local Dutch police and also met with the bank to which we had wired the money. This was not Egbert’s bank but a different one, luckily in the same city. The banker told him he couldn’t say if our funds were still there because of privacy laws, yet Egbert felt the banker was trying to tell him that the funds were still there. I had already sent all the proof that our emails had been hacked to the police, and


ing PDFs or Word documents, with or without a password, aren’t secure either. The type of hacking that occurred in Rebecca’s situation likely included a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack along with “email spoofing.” Email spoofing is the creation of email messages with a forged sender address. Today’s standard email protocols, such as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), do not have any method of authenticating the origin of an email. This makes it easy for fraudulent people to send an email from one location but make it look like it came from another location. A man-in-the-middle attack involves an attacker secretly relaying and often altering the communication between two parties who believe they are directly communicating with each other. Wiring bank funds for a high dollar, long-distance purchase is standard procedure and is still the best way to conduct


How Did this Cyber-Theft Happen? After speaking to a number of IT security professionals, we learned standard email


is not secure and you should never assume email messages are private. Attach-


such transactions. Wiring is especially useful when funds have to be converted to a foreign currency. Here are the safest ways to send bank account information as well as other private information:  Communicate it in your voice over the telephone.  Encrypt and password-protect a file with the sensitive data using a zip program like Winzip or 7-Zip and attach that


to your email. Use at least 256-bit encryption and give the intended receiver the password over the phone. Obviously, the receiver must have a zip program to unencrypt the file.  Use an encrypted email account to send the sensitive information (no more gmails, hotmails, etc.) which can be


purchased for a nominal monthly fee from email providers such as Protonmail (search for “encrypted email providers” in your browser). There are even free versions available but either way you want a product that allows the receiver of the email to respond back to you securely. Although none of the above methods are 100 percent secure, they make it much harder for hackers to attack and are


much more secure than other ways of communicating sensitive information. Remember, it’s critical to protect your finan- cial information.


26 May/June 2017


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