[ExI] hacked email

[spike]

Subject: Re: [ExI] hacked email

On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 1:43 PM, spike wrote:


> Security hipsters, I need some advice or ideas...

Thanks to all who have posted ideas.  

Regarding the break-in, we think it was a walk-in.  One of the family
historians gave this young cousin his site password in case he dies
unexpectedly.  We think he used the same password for his email.  When we
mentioned the possibility, he didn't actually deny it but seemed to talk
around the question.  If you leave your door unlocked and someone walks into
your home and wrecks your stuff, well, you share the responsibility.

Some further background:  since this is family history stuff, anyone who has
ever done this kind of thing probably already knows the biggest challenges.
Your most valuable players are nearly always little old ladies.  Our MVP is
91.  Little old ladies know things, and remember them long after we boys
have died or long since forgotten because they don't matter much to us.  The
real challenge is they have little or no computer sophistication.  They log
on, they read, they reply, they send.  When this whole thing came down, my
mother really freaked.  She isn't really a little old lady, in her 70s, but
she has been a computer user since 1968.  In a classic over reaction, she
erased her entire email archive, every sent item, every received.  Owww,
damn.  Those archives contained a lot of family history info which is now
lost forever.  Sigh.

Several of the MVPs are her aunts and cousins, in their 80s and the one in
her 90s.

So any solution we use must be fairly unsophisticated and may not involve
all of them.  For the really old ones we don't really need to use this:
their style is easy enough to recognize.  But they are not the object of
wrath anyway.  The bad actor is a young lady, and she has the most animosity
toward the other young ladies involved (perhaps a jealousy thing, we don't
know.)

In any case, I have an idea for how to run with that one-time pad notion
Mike LaTorra posted.  Here's the notion: I derive a list of 2400 words, make
a table in excel on my son's computer which we know has not been
compromised.  I send it to the younger generation only and don't worry the
old ones with this.  Then when someone writes a post, they look up the time
in hours and minutes, puts the word beside that number.  Then we change the
pad every couple weeks.  So this post would have something like

0834 carbuncle

We don't need military level security, just an indicator.  Wouldn't that
work?

spike