Cybersecurity Tips for Families with Eric O’Neill

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My guest on the show today is cyber security expert Eric O'Neill. Eric is a legendary FBI operative featured in the film Breach. He's a best selling author, technology futurist, and an attorney. His career began in the FBI's counterintelligence trenches as an undercover operative. His work brought down Robert Hanson, the most notorious and damaging spy in United States history.

Since then, Eric has spent decades as a national security attorney, corporate investigator, and a national cyber security strategist. His story became the Hollywood thriller, Breach, and he authored his own best selling book, Gray Day. Now, Eric speaks to thousands each year across the world, inspiring audiences to protect themselves and giving them actionable tools to do so. But most importantly, he's a dad. Here's my conversation with Eric O'Neill.

So, Eric, thank you so much for being on the show with me today. Uh, introduce yourself to everybody.

And I am a thought leader and public speaker and published author in cybersecurity.

So, uh, your career kind of came into notoriety, uh, over at the FBI when you were a part of the takedown of Robert Hansen. Uh, so kind of walk us through what that was like and, uh, to really take down like America's first cyber spy. Yes. So my. My earliest career was, as I said, at the FBI. I was working counterintelligence, counterterror. And what that means is that I would go undercover every day. Almost never was in an office. I was fully undercover. I even had a code name.

People didn't even know me by my name. I worked on teams and squads. And we would track and investigate either foreign spies operating on US soil, uh, American citizens who had gone rogue and sold out to foreign spies, uh, or terrorists who, you know, back in the late, you know, in the nineties were, were operating quite frequently. And we'd stop any of these. individuals before they did their dastardly deed. They're stealing secrets and sending them over to a foreign power.

If they were an American selling the secrets to that foreign power, or if they were a terrorist, uh, blowing things up and we would stop them before they did all that. So my job was to be undercover. It was to be behind the telephoto lens, you know, doing vehicular surveillance, using multiple disguises all day, pretext, social engineering, never showing my badge or credentials. And then suddenly in December of 2000, I was asked to go undercover in the most unique case the FBI had ever run.

I was to go undercover to catch one of our own. Robert Hansen, who it turns out had spied for the Soviet Union and then the Russian Federation. That's how long this guy spied for over 22 years. He was our most damaging spy in the FBI's history and quite possibly US history. And he spied for Russia and gave up some of the most egregious secrets that have ever been given to a foreign power.

He was the most, best placed mole that the Soviet Union ever put in the intelligence community in the United States. And he gave up billions of dollars worth of information for millions of dollars. So he didn't even take anywhere near what the information that he gave up was worth. Man. That, that, that is amazing. And I remember when that story happened and thinking, like, my goodness, how could, how could something like this have happened?

Because we had just gotten over, not even gotten over, we had just experienced 9 11. And so, it was like this time in America where we're thinking, like, we are much more vulnerable. Than we thought but it is, uh, amazing the case that you guys put, uh, up against him and you were You were using not only were you, you know sitting behind a computer doing stuff But you were also out in the field working this case, right? Well

The cloak and dagger, dead drops, and signal sites, and what Hansen would do is he'd steal secrets, and he'd wrap them in trash bags and packing tape, and they'd put them under a footbridge.

In Foxstone Park in Vienna, Virginia, and then he'd leave and he'd set a little piece of tape on a sign and an intelligence officer knowing what date generally he would do his drop would leave the Russian embassy and drive around and and after eight hours of just driving around to make sure someone like me wasn't following him.

They'd look at the sign and if they saw the tape, they would know that the drop had been set and they'd go into the park, make sure they weren't seen, that no one was on their tail, and then recover the package, get it to the embassy, put it in the diplomatic pouch, send it overseas, and it would be opened in Moscow. And now Russia has all our secrets. So that's sort of the old way that it happened. And those take time. Sometimes it can be a year between drops.

So we thought we need to get Hansen into to stay at the FBI for at least a year because we wanted him to make a drop and catch him red handed. So they gave him his dream job. They built a brand new section in the FBI entire and in a whole division actually. And they put him in charge of it. And it was the information assurance section. And what that really was, was cybersecurity.

So they put Robert Hanson, the best penetrated mole in the US intelligence community in charge of building cybersecurity for the FBI. Why? Well, one, they wanted to give him his dream job so he would stay and not retire.

And two, They wanted to give him access to information so he would steal it because we needed to catch him red handed, not only to punish him, but to put enough pressure on him to get him to say what he'd done for all these years so we could fix it and make the FBI and the intelligence community stronger. And it worked. So we moved back to headquarters. He took the job. He got promoted to executive service. You know, he was a decorated agent, but he had never made it to executive service.

That's like the highest echelon in the FBI. So they gave him the big promotion, the bigger pay. Uh, you know, better benefits, you know, I in office and they had to give them staff. They needed someone in there to watch him, to investigate him, to talk to him and to find out how we were going to actually catch him to give early warning that he was about to make a drop. I looked all over the FBI and they found apparently the only guy who knew how to catch a spy and turn on a computer.

And that was me. So they just threw me in the room with them, locked that big vault door, shook the thing up and hoped I came out. Okay.

So for the people who are listening to my show, you know, we are parents. We are looking at, as parents, we never thought we would have to be cyber security experts ourselves. This is not something that we had anticipated. Today we have all of these online predators who are trying to spy on our kids and things like that. What is it that today's parents need to know from your experience to protect their kids online? Yeah,

She's a really good driver, but it's this sudden independence, flying the nest, like able to go wherever she wants and doesn't need her dad to drive her around. Uh, then I have a 14 year old son, and then my youngest daughter. is 11. So I'm right in the thick of it. And they are, our children have embraced technology in a way that, you know, an old Gen X or like me, you know, it can't imagine, look, I'm Gen X. We grew up with technology.

I mean, we, we started, you know, just, just the anger that every Gen X person feels and having to change your, your, uh, music. Uh, library. Oh, yeah. How many times we start with, with records and you throw those out, cassette tapes and then throw those out. Get now it's CDs. Great. That's going to be evergreen. No. Now it's MP3s and all that stuff goes to the trash. Um, so we understand the progression of technology, but at least there was sort of a slow roll.

I think with our children, we've thrown the right into the deep end of the pool with social media, which is a dangerous, dangerous, horrible thing. There's, there's, I mean, there are plus sides of social media, but for teens and kids, especially young kids. It is a bad idea. And I've had to work very closely with my children. And what I've done is instruct them about all of the horrible things that can happen if you're not careful. And we have rules.

Like for example, my wife and I debated and talked and we decided that we weren't going to give any of our children activated phones until they were 14. when they were more responsible and able to know how to use it. Because once you give your kid a phone with a plan, right, they're not tethered to your wireless at home anymore. And they can go anywhere, do anything, see anything. They will find ways to work around your screen time.

It will find ways to work around your preventions and what they can install. And they're smart. You're hoping your kids are smart. Sometimes they hack the screen time code All the time. I know they're shoulder surfing my wife. They're looking over her shoulder when she puts it in. They have these entire plans, all three of them conspire together to make sure the littlest one is watching when, you know, she's, she's changing something and, uh, and they get it.

So it's more important to educate them than to try to lock things down because they will circumvent cybersecurity, your cybersecurity. So they have to understand the threat. And that's where a good parent. Can sit down with them and really talk it through. And that's where I've been focusing a lot of my writing for parents to understand this. I've been publishing a lot on LinkedIn. There are a lot of examples because there is. an immense amount of harm, Andy, that is out there.

And cyber criminals have learned that children are the softest targets of all. They're gullible. They have biases that they believe when they see the social media, they want to have friends desperately. And so it's easy to connect with them. And they have pristine credit scores. So if their identity can be stolen, you might not know as a parent until your child goes and applies for their first credit card. Their identity has been stolen for years, that they've got massive amounts of debt.

I'm writing a new book called The Invisible Threat, and it's gonna be published next year by HarperCollins. And there are, I think, I was just going to have a chapter. There are like three or four now about the threats to kids. I, it's a chapter called it starts with a chapter called exploitation. And I start with a story about this young man who wanted to enlist in the army. And he decided that this is what he was going to do. And then he was going to serve in the army.

He came from, you know, not a poor family. And this was going to be his roadmap to college. He's working with the recruiter and everything looked perfect. He scored incredibly high. He was going to go into intelligence until they did his background and found out that his credit score was abysmal because someone had stolen his identity and racked up all of this debt in his name. And so he, he didn't make his enlistment. Oh my goodness. This can happen and you don't find out until it's too late.

So you have to be very careful with your kids. You need to be looking at their credit scores. But let's get back to social media. Sure. There are things you can do. It's very, very dangerous. Um, two of the things that can happen are very simple and two of the things, two other things that I'll talk about are very dangerous.

So first of all, social media bullying is a big deal. It is massive. It happens constantly. And bullying used to be when we were kids in school, you know, you might get bullied at school or someone would be mean to you. You'd feel bad. You'd go home. You'd go, you'd get on your bike. You'd go hang out with your best friend. Everything was fine. And then you'd go back to school and maybe you had to deal with the kid.

Maybe you didn't, but now it leaves school and it continues as long as they're on their devices because the kids don't stop. So it can be very prevalent and it can be incredibly demoralizing and stressful on kids. The other thing that's happening now with AI and deep fakes that you have to watch out for is kids. These really clever kids are using AI deep fakes to ramp up bullying to a level that we've never seen.

So there was, there have been a number of schools where kids have gotten in trouble because it's mostly the boys. They take all the girls and they swap their faces using a simple online AI face swapper with naked images and then send them all, all, all around to social media. And there are even, um, And I mean, it's, it's horrible to think, but AI is very good at, at scanning a body.

They take, they can even take original pictures of their classmates, have the AI scan the body and just remove the clothes. It's hyper realistic and it can be immensely devastating to a young girl. Sure. But these are things that I have to worry about. And these are school things that schools are grappling with. And then you take it to the next level where criminals are going after our children's using what's called sex torsion. And that is terrifying.

If you have teenagers, especially if you have a teenage boy, you have to sit down with them. You have to talk to them about this. And you have to come at it from a place of total love and understanding. If you do something stupid, come to me right away. Yeah, right. Because there was a kid like, look, if you just look at the FBI statistics on this, since 2001, uh, since 2021, sorry. It's gone up something like 200%.

And since then, at least 3000 children and teenagers have been targeted by criminals and more than a dozen have killed themselves. So just a quick story. There's this 17 year old boy in Michigan and he gets a text on Instagram through Instagram Instagram chat. From this beautiful girl. And she says, her name is Danny Roberts. And, uh, she's a friend of a friend. And she got his information and they'd start just chatting. Now he's got a girlfriend. He's a football star.

He's really well loved and liked and, you know, but he's a 17 year old boy. He's flattered that this beautiful girl is chatting with him. So as he's packing to go on vacation the next day, he's chatting with her. And, um, suddenly the chat gets a little bit more and then she sends him a naked picture of herself. And, uh, and he's, he's you know, like any 17 year old boy would be, you know, he does know what to say. And then she starts pressuring him, say, well, I sent you, you send me.

And he does. Uh, he's, he goes in the bathroom. He takes his clothes off. He just snaps a picture, picture of himself. He sends it to her. And then there's a delay and he receives a picture of himself completely naked, standing in the bathroom mirror, surrounded by a collage of all his friends and family. And there's no longer Danny Roberts. It's clearly an avatar. They, they hijacked a real account. These two, um, cyber criminals in Lagos, Nigeria, and now they start pressuring them.

He sends the money. They want more money. He says, you know, I'm, I'm, I, I, I'm terrified. I don't know what to do. You're, you're, you're going to cause me to heart hurt myself. They start saying, hurt yourself. You can go through the entire chat. It's, it's terrible because there was a legal case. And finally he says, I think I'm going to kill myself and they convince him to do it. And he does, his father finds him the next morning.

He had gotten, uh, gotten a handgun out of the house and, uh, ended his life. So absolute tragedy. Those two, uh, so the police and the FBI were able to track back the IP address, address these two brothers sitting in Nigeria, extradited him here to the U S and there, uh, they were indicted and standing trial. So at least there was some justice, but any family would rather have their kid. And this is what's happening. Keep your kids away from social media as much as you can.

My rules are that, you know, If you haven't touched them in the last year, physically, they're not a friend. They're just an online contact. Yeah. Don't talk to people you don't know online. Don't listen to what people tell you that you, you talk to online, stick with your close friends and don't post anything. You wouldn't want your grandparents to see, right? So no skimpy outfits, none of that, you know, uh, remove things from posts. And I explained to my children who are all athletes.

Your coaches, when you want to go to college, we'll want to see your accounts. And if they see dumb stuff, whether you post it or somebody posts it and tags you, then, uh, you might lose a scholarship. You might lose a spot on a team. Uh, they might, they might think that you're not morally a right fit and you might lose an opportunity. So, you know, you have to speak to them that way that you're, you're, you know, we, my dad used to say, when I do dumb things, I'm mortgaging my future. Right?

You're mortgaging your future. You're, you're putting a cost onto your future by doing dumb things when you're young. So you just really have to explain it to them, uh, in, in a way that is coming from a very positive sense. Like these are the terrible things that can happen, but I'm here to help you. So if you're, I don't care what it is. I won't judge you. Just bring it to me so we can talk about it.

But you're saying from the beginning, set up and establish that, hey, we are on the same team here, I am here to help you, if there's a problem, please come to me, right?

And if it's extortion, if it's something that could lead to them harming themselves, you want them to feel so comfortable with you that they knock on the door and they say, look, dad, mom, I I'm in the middle of this chat. And I did something stupid and I don't know what to do. He went at that moment when they don't know what to do and they're completely lost, you want them to run to you and you want them to do that their whole life.

Yeah, 25 when they're 30, when they're 40 years old, I still call me, you know, I'm 51. I call my dad and ask him for advice all the time because that was the way I was raised. It was always this like, come to me with anything, you know, I'm here to solve your problems. Um, now they need their independence.

You don't want to, you don't want to, um, you know, helicopter parent them, but, but you do want, you do want to be that relief valve when they're completely lost and they need somebody be that person for them.

Um, but what I do do is we use identity monitoring for the family. Um, if you're looking for a great company, there's a really easy one to use. They have a family plan. It's called aura. I like them a lot. Um, that's what I'm using right now. Um, but there are plenty like that. The idea is that you want to get identity money for your family. That gives you that early alert, that Your kid's social security number has been used to open a credit card free.

I have frozen the credit and then I had to unfreeze it when I, when they got old enough to get,

Um, you, uh, I, we opened up a youth checking account. Now we opened a youth checking account and a youth savings account. And this is important. You want to open both and teach them that our kids are brilliant with apps. So they're very good at using the app.

And then they use their phones to check out everywhere, which is more secure than a credit card, get them a debit card, not a credit card, and then have them, um, maintain most of their money in their savings account. That's not tied to the debit card. And then as they need to buy something, you know, if they're at the store, they're at Chipotle, they're doing whatever, uh, with their friends, they, they move it on their app from their saving to their checking. Why?

Sadly, friends and associates of friends will steal debit cards and copy down numbers and charge things. This happened to my daughter. And, uh, you know, I, when it happened to her, it was something like 120. It was, I was like all the money that was in her checking account at the time. It was completely devastating. It was all gone. She saw, she saw her balance and she called me. And so we went through and we looked at all the places that, cause you can see where it's been.

You know, where all the purchases were made, they were all relatively local. And I started just calling all of the stores and, and, you know, stores won't give out information. It's always like, look, I'm a father, I'm former FBI and law enforcement. I was law enforcement. You don't have to tell me the address. Um, but you just tell me the zip code. You tell me the, the area.

And then finally someone gave me the address that went to, it was one of her friends and who was pressured by this group of girls she was involved with. That was in this ring of stealing credit cards and making charges. And then when I called all the parents and said, this is happening, the parents started looking at their credit cards.

and realizing that their kids had spent thousands of dollars on their on their charges on their parents, um, intercepted packages when they showed up from Amazon, all sorts of stuff. So it was a big deal. So you want to make sure that they understand how to not only organize their money and safeguard it, but, but these smart lessons start really early. Yeah. So now what, you know, my kids, when I, and also I can monitor everything they spend because it's a, it's a youth checking account.

Um, so I can see what they're doing. And when I have to send them allowance, I just transfer from my account to theirs. It makes it really easy. Uh, and it, it teaches them very good habits. You know, balancing the money that they're going to get for their allowance versus how much they spend versus protecting their accounts. Um, also don't have overdraft protection, right? Right. So you don't want any overdraft so that it'll get declined.

If someone tries to spend more than what is in the checking account.

I wanted to go back to something you talked about earlier with the young man. Um, I want to say like in Michigan, were they running a gift card scam with him? At some point you talked about them trying to get him to pay with a gift card. They had him actually

I think you can get, you know, a thousand of these and it will only cost you 500. But this deal is going to go fast, you know, you, and then send me this money. And, um, yeah, you know, the kids send the money and nothing ever happens, you know, the, um, and your kids shouldn't feel too embarrassed because. around the holidays, this is one of the biggest scams that happens to adults.

She's like, we're trying to slow her down, but we can't stop her from doing this. And so I even taught, there was even, I was on the, she was on the phone and she was like, oh, I need to go get something from my car and the other person says something like what you don't want me to put the phone down, you know, and that was kind of like the nail in the coffin as to what was going on here. And so I, I tried to talk to her and say, Hey, ma'am, what's going on? Can I help you here?

I don't think this is right. And so she, you know, is like, I don't, you know, I don't want your help. I don't want anything. She ends up putting the money on the card and leaving. And I don't know what happened to her after that. I've always regretted that. I don't think I handled myself very well, but my son was there and he saw it. And so I had to fully explain to him, you know, here's what she's experiencing on the other side of the phone. She doesn't realize what she's doing.

She's just in a panic. And as much as we tried to help this lady in the end, we couldn't.

And, um, and, and he says, well, look, look, ma'am, this is Panama and we do things differently here. Your son was arrested for whatever case, you know, uh, but we'll let him go, uh, if you'll, you'll pay us his release fee. You know, and, and, and the poor grandma goes, well, what should I do? And then the son makes it explicit, like, don't tell my parents, don't tell my parents, I'll pay you back. And so they send her to a, uh, 24 hour pharmacy. This is like the middle of the night.

And she gets up and gets dressed and drives to this 24 hour pharmacy and is literally in the pharmacy, reading off the, uh, gift cards. Because they tell her go to the pharmacy, buy the gift cards, they just like you saw on the phone, they talk her through it. And that could be that could have been that kind of situation that that that panic, that fear that something's going to happen to someone she loves.

And if she doesn't do this, and these kind of scams are constant AI is making it worse, because that that was just an act that you know, somebody, a cyber criminal pretending to be but but now what they do is they clone voices. And so you hear, I mean, there's this horrible, um, situation in Arizona where a mother hears her daughter's voice. She knows it's her daughter's voice. She even testifies before Congress later and says, a mother knows her daughter's voice. That was my daughter's voice.

And it was, they had stolen the daughter's voice from social media, cloned the voice, and the daughter, uh, calls the mom screaming hysterically, I've been kidnapped. They're going to kill me. And the next voice that gets on is the, you know, kidnapper. It's like, we've got your daughter, we, we've taken her to Mexico. If you don't pay us, she's going to die. This is the amount that you have to give us.

And they start negotiating and talking about how, um, this poor mother is going to transfer the funds. And she was smart at the same time. She has like her friends. They Like trying to call the daughter trying to call the husband because the daughter and the husband were away on a trip. The attackers are clever. They mine your social media to find out when the family will be separated.

You know, the daughter's on the trip, the mother's at home, we, we call the mom using the synthetic voice of the daughter, the AI avatar, when the daughter's away with the husband, so it's harder to communicate, they'll even try to coordinate when the, uh, the other person's on a plane, right, and can't be texted, or called, um, and they finally get in touch with the daughter. and the police.

Um, uh, so she didn't end up paying any money, but, uh, you know, it was, can you imagine the, the emotional devastation? And, you know, like a year later, she still says she has nightmares over it.

There's so much of like your voice that's on the internet that people can build some pretty convincing profiles about you and I. So just kind of as a disclaimer, you know, I tell them, You may hear my voice, but if it's not something that I would say or do, because obviously I speak differently on this, you speak differently when you're doing an interview, just, you gotta tell your family to think.

You know, you and I, we've been talking about a lot of scary, High tech stuff some things that are you know plans that have been worked on and you know I feel like families are sometimes Overwhelmed by all the bad stuff that's out there telling everybody here who's listening to this conversation. Take a deep breath What is it that we really need to know and understand at our core that's going to help us and keep us safe in the event of these scams and these online predators and things like that?

What is it that you can tell people to help calm down and to understand what they really need to look at and focus on?

So for that, uh, Arizona mom example, right? Uh, because it is so easy to clone a voice, have a code phrase. Sit down with your family at dinner and come up with a cool code phrase that's known only to you. Um, we've done it in my family and, um, we did it in the FBI. It's called a sign of life.

I mean, when you work counter terror, if you're ever kidnapped by a terrorist, um, and you know, they call your squad and say, you know, we've got Eric O'Neill, you know, send us all this money or, or we're going to behead him or whatever. Um, there's a sign of life. They have an envelope. They open. That they've never opened and I've got my code phrase in it. And if I don't say the code phrase, they know that I'm not alive. Uh, and here with your family, it doesn't have to be that dark.

Um, have a code phrase so that if someone tries to fool you with AI, you know, that your kid is going to work the code phrase in if they ever are actually kidnapped, or you can ask, so what's the code phrase? And if they can't answer, you know, they're faking, it only takes five minutes and 5 to make an AI avatar. You can now create an AI voice off of someone's voicemail. So it's, you don't need a whole huge video. Everybody's kind of screwed the same way, Andy.

It's just not, it's not just you and me. Uh, other things you can do, um, use identity monitoring. Most of us have it anyway, just because we've been breached. There was just a mega breach of 2. 9 billion usernames, passwords, social security numbers. Everybody who has credit monitoring is finding out that their social security number has been compromised. That's because one of the huge background check companies was breached and they had all our data. I mean, shame on them, right?

So, uh, use credit monitoring. And if you don't want to pay for credit mining, you can't afford it. Uh, the big three credit agencies each provide a free credit report every year. So every three months or so you can, you can choose one of the big three credit agencies, uh, trans union, uh, Equifax. And, uh, the, the third one, it's just skipping my mind, but you can download it for free. Yeah, exactly. You can download it for free.

And, uh, and go through it, you know, you download, you use your social security number, you go through and it'll show you anywhere your social security number has been used that, that, and if you see something you didn't authorize, you can report it to each of the credit agencies. And then you go through the, the lengthy process of getting, of getting it defrauded. Um, you can also, uh, have those conversations with your kids about being smart, about what they do online.

Where the predators are and avoiding them. Uh, a couple of things that are really easy to do. Set all of your social media and work with your kids to do this. And they might be even able to teach you how to do it to private, don't have it open, you know, and the way you can test is.

Have, have a, you know, you know, someone who isn't friends with you go on your social media accounts and is everything open like Facebook is a fan favorite for social criminals who will go on because so many people don't turn it to private. That means you want it to be seen by only friends. And be careful who you make a friend because they will try to pretend that there's somebody, you know, and sneak into your, um, you know, allow you to accept them as a friend.

And then now they can see all of your information. Your kids need to do this too, especially if the social media they use. And I promise you the social media they use are, is not the social media that you use, right there. Uh, they love Snapchat. I don't know a teenager who isn't communicating almost a hundred percent on Snapchat. I do a lot of writing about Snapchat. It's not a hundred. It's not as secure as the kids think. Uh, those, uh, pictures do not go away. They are stored by Snapchat.

Uh, a law enforcement can ask for them and they can be found. Um, it does, it does track IP addresses, um, which is good if your identity has been stolen through Snapchat, but attackers will try to steal identities in Snapchat and use it to do all sorts of things. Um, they can connect with others for fraud. They can actually use it to try to get into, to open bank accounts and other financial things. You don't, you want to have everything set as private as possible.

And one more thing that's very important. I wouldn't be a cybersecurity person if I didn't say this every single time I get an opportunity. Turn on two factor authentication everywhere. And I'm saying everywhere. Eve, especially your social media accounts. You don't want your social media account to get hijacked. You will not get it back. It takes forever and someone will use it to defraud all of your friends and family.

So you turn on two factor authentication and by that I mean, you know, you log in, you put in your username, your password, and then it goes to the next screen where you get your code texted to you or even better an authenticator app on your phone. And then you type in the code and now you're in the bad guy is not going to have your phone, so they're not going to, well, let's just say most of the time, they're not going to have your phone. There are ways, but it's probably not going to happen.

And, uh, they've not going to get that extra code when you get those emails that say, here's your authentication code, or you get those texts just randomly, that's someone trying to break into your account because username and password. So when you see that go change your password on your account.

But what are some, um, You know, physical cues that parents can look for to understand. Hey, something's up here. Either they've done something and they think they've gotten away with it or they've done something and it's made them uncomfortable. What are some of the things that we can look for in our Children that might lead us to start asking questions?

Um, you, you know, you, you have to be in touch with your kids. You, you, you have to understand them, you know, to see them and you have to pay attention to them and see when something's wrong. I mean, you know, when something's off with your kid and ask them, it could be bullying. It could be something that's happening through social media. Uh, look, you pay for that phone, you pay for the plan. I, you know, we have a rule.

If you can't change, you know, when I want to get into your phone, I get to get into your phone. If I want to look at your social media, I get to look at your social media. Um, and they know it. And so there, that makes them be a little bit more careful. They will have the account they show you and they will have the account they use. So, you know, when you, you can every once in a while do a spot check of the phone and maybe the account they use is still logged on and you can see it that way.

Every kid does it. So you don't need to be punitive about it, but you need to make them understand that, you know, trying to hide this from me doesn't mean that you're not going to get in trouble in a different way. Um, and you know, just make sure that they're, they're always thinking about security. And, uh, you know, my, my kids, I'll tell you just a one last really quick story. We learned about, um, this.

Cabal, this conspiracy to hijack the Netflix account because we were paying attention to the kid and our youngest, I think she was eight at the time, was watching, uh, like an R rated thing on Netflix, hiding in a room when she was supposed to be on screen time. And I grabbed him and was like, okay, what happened? Then I went into investigation mode. So I interrogated them all separately. Right. So they couldn't get their story straight before they knew that this was happening.

And after the interrogation, I found out that the, uh, One of the kids had shoulder surfed my wife, uh, figured out her, um, her passcode to her phone, right? Gone into the phone, gone into her phone when my wife set it down by using the passcode, added her fingerprint, and then what she would do is she would make the screen time request, right?

And, um, she'd make the screen time request, When my wife had the phone set out on the counter, run to the phone real quick, put it on our fingerprint, accept the screen time request, swipe it away, and then get another hour of screen time. Right? So when this was the eight year old who did this, the eight year old, and when the older kids found out about this, That suddenly my, the youngest had access to the mom's phone.

They got involved, got the fingerprint access to the phone, went into the passwords, found out the password to Netflix, then went into the next place account and elevated all their accounts to, you know, are rated. And that was apparently the Christmas present from the eight year old to the older kids. Wow. So yeah, they're really clever. So if you're not watching them, they're going to get away with stuff. You know, you know, go see what they're doing at night.

When screen time is supposed to be on, when they're supposed to be studying, where they're supposed to be in bed, When they're supposed to be sleeping, knock on their door, you know, check on them, see what they're doing, you know, if they're spending all this time on their phone, tell them to read a freaking book, you know, we don't allow phones at the dinner table, we require each of the kids to read a book every day, every, you know, they always have

a book that they're reading, and then we talk about the books that they're reading, you know, we, we try to make them go outside, you know, that That's it. They're athletes, so they're outside a lot anyway, but, um, you got to engage them with things that don't draw them to their phones. When their friends come over, we, uh, we have everybody put their phones down somewhere. We don't let them go up in the room and just sit there next to each other, you know, texting their friends.

It's what's the point of anyone coming over, right? Keep your kids. Keep your kids. Together in person try to keep them offline as much as possible and they will be way healthier There's a reason that the major tech, you know billionaires don't even allow their kids to have phones or tablets or be online at all Right because they know the dangers.

I send out checklists of things that you need to look for, things that you can do, things you need to think about, and it can all really help parents, um, understand how to tackle this. This amazing online world that we live in,

For more, go to FlipLok.com and use the discount code Secure Dad to get 20% off your entire order. For more on The Secure Dad, consider subscribing to the official Secure Dad YouTube channel. You can watch all of my interviews there, including this one with Eric. Just search for The Secure Dad the next time you're on YouTube. I'm Andy Murphy reminding you that our safety is our own responsibility.