Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey everybody, it is Bobby and Barry and we're back with our latest episode of Care Tech and Tips. Today we're going to talk about dealing with email spoofing pass keys, how you use those and what they're all about. We're going to talk some about tackling caregiving syndrome and how you can deal with that. And beyond that, we're going to talk about creating easier displays for loved ones.
Mr. Clark, how are you doing?
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Fine, man.
[00:00:41] Speaker C: Get this ready to talk.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: It's been a little while.
I know everybody probably has their summer things going on. I know you and I do.
[00:00:48] Speaker C: But I run into this particular subject.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: As I talk to more and more family and they're seeing more and more of the scams that are out there. Now there's a new one that. Well, it's not really new, but it's certainly more prominent than it has been in the past. And it's called email spoofing.
And it starts off as you get a message from somebody, somebody you trust and it says something like, hey, I need to meet you at 11, it's really urgent or I'm in trouble and I need your help or something like that. And if you're not careful what you think is that message is from that person and they're in trouble and you act urgently and that might be giving them information that they don't need or it could be even giving them money or funding that they, that you think will solve their problem because you think you're talking to someone loved one. So what we found is a lot of people are doing this and impersonating people. So they're not hacking that person's email, they're actually you sending it from another email that belongs to them and just putting the name in front of it of somebody you recognize. And that kind of thing is called email spoofing. It occurs when the sender falsifies the from address or email address of the header to make it look like it belongs to somebody you know. It's commonly used with phishing attacks and tries to trick people into opening an email or clicking on malicious links, for example. So you may see a thing that says to John Smith, the actual email address might be hackeralicious domain.
[00:02:07] Speaker C: Com and that's not your.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Your friend's John Smith's email. And it's sometimes aided upon because the clients we use for email do things.
[00:02:16] Speaker C: To try to hide the techn the.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Technical details behind it.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Right.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: So you only see the name.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Yeah. A lot of times it'll look like a link or something when you see.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: The name, and most of them, if you take your cursor and put it on top of that link, it'll show you what the email address is. And they're not even being close, although I have seen some things that are pretty obvious. But this doesn't belong to them. I mean, somebody talking about being a governmental agency and it has a Gmail address, you know that that's not true. But you gotta also be careful because what they can also do is take an address and make it very similar and do things like instead of I's, they put L's, instead of E's, they put S's. You know, they, they're off just by one number.
You know, instead of John Smith with no E, it's John Smith with an E.
So stuff like that, that would try to, that you wouldn't look twice at maybe in normal, that gets you to react to it. So you should be really careful about that. I know some email clients actually do some things to help protect you from that. Like if it doesn't match your, your contact list, it'll give you some kind of indication that something's going on here.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: So once you, as caregivers, we need to be aware of this because certainly your loved ones, if they're using mail at all, they're not paying attention to the details and they can really catch them up. So.
[00:03:30] Speaker C: So just to give you an idea.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Of some of the terms out there, that's called spoofing.
There are some other terms out there that you may hear like phishing, which is a broader category of attack where someone is trying to trick you into doing things. And spoofing is just one of the tools they use to do it. You may hear it also called social engineering, where because they know it's me and they know I'm friends with Barry, they use Barry as the contact because they think maybe that's the someone that's familiar to me that I won't give a second thought to. And so just be aware. You can have large scale attacks like this on businesses and on groups. So one of the things that I saw was I'm a part of a nonprofit group. We got a little more prominent in our listing and we listed up some new officers. And that's when some of these, these hackers paid attention to that maybe on an Instagram account or something and use those names to attack other people in the group.
[00:04:18] Speaker C: Gotcha.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: So just be aware of it.
[00:04:20] Speaker C: We're going to drop some information in the show. Notes about It. There's a couple of. I made a quick through that kind of gives the simple explanation of it to. That you could use when you're talking to your loved ones so you don't have to be all that complicated about it. So it's really about, you know, trust. Trusting a display name only is not a good idea. And making sure that you don't click on suspicious looks. You only have email, so just, Just something to be aware of. And, you know, it's becoming more prominent this summer. I've seen it more active in this way. So just be aware.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: I think that's great advice. And, you know, it kind of reminds me of the spoofing thing. There's, you know, for years, at least in my circles, there's a lot of friends on Facebook. Will. You'll get a message out of the blue. It'll be like, well, let me back up. You'll get a friend request from somebody that you're already friends with.
[00:05:06] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: And then usually within about 24 hours, you'll see your actual friend put a message out on Facebook. I've been hacked. Don't, don't. Don't click on anything that this person who claims to be me is. That.
Don't do any of that. Well, you know, it really comes down to, like you said, it's not. They haven't been hacked. They've been spoofed. Someone's trying to pretend to be them and they're playing on your feelings for that person or your relationship with that person to, To. To get an in and to get to your friends and to get, you know, down. Down the road trying to, to get whatever they're hawking or whatever they're trying to use as social engineering to, To. To push their agenda. So, yeah, spoofing is something you got to pay attention to. And you know what, Bobby? This past week, I had a weird kind of spoofing attack on me from. It's an. I guess it's technically an email spoofing attack, but it wasn't trying to be somebody that I know. It was an AI trying to be a human or trying to pretend to be a human. So now that one blew me away. I was. I got an email out of the blue asking actually something about podcasting and said, hey, we, We. We. We've looked at your. We've looked at your YouTube. We've, we've heard your podcast, and we think you would be a great addition to this podcast where you could come and be a guest on it. And yeah, okay, why not? So I responded back, I said, I can't do this week. Maybe we could do it next week sometime. And then the, the reply came back way too fast and the, the, the diction was just a little too good. It was a little off. And you and I, we, we're, we're tech people. We can tell fairly quickly when something was written by AI or when it was written by him. And my little AI detector went off in my head going, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. So after this, still kind of weird, but let's see what goes on. So it asked another question and I wrote back an answer. And it came back again just instantaneously, so fast for an email. And by this time I think, yeah, there is no, there is no podcast. They want to get information from me about when I'm available or to do something. And I wrote back and said that. I think that the funny thing was, is the name that it was supposed to be was actually the name of an actor. Louise Guzman. Guzman. He shows up on all kinds of movies. And I thought, that's interesting. Louise is. That's the same name. So I wrote back, I said, louise, I'm just guess here that you sound an awfully lot like an LLM. What model were you, Were you based on? And then it disappeared. It never answered anything else again.
So. So not only can you be spoofed by humans, but you can be spooked by AI So I just had my spidey sense go off and was able to kick that in pretty quickly. But it's something to look out for.
[00:07:47] Speaker C: You know, don't, don't trust your sense.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: If you.
[00:07:50] Speaker C: I mean, we've been both doing this for 30 plus years and so we kind of seen a lot of. But just to make sure we get those rules now, because, you know, I could hear this now from relatives in my head going, so what do I do? So, you know, so again, hover over the email address. Make sure not just the name, figure out what that address is.
Look for mismatch or spoofed domains. Mycompany.com, yourcompany.com, stuff like that. It doesn't make any sense at all. If it's a government entity, it will end in.gov.
there are no government agencies with Gmail.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: Accounts, you know, so.
[00:08:25] Speaker C: And you know, just be aware of that. If it wants something urgently, there's almost no reason to do that on email. If I'm your friend, if you have friends and they need something urgent, they're.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: Going to call you.
[00:08:37] Speaker C: Yeah, they're not going to do that in email and then report the phishing to the person of the group being targeted because guess what, if they're aware of it, they can warn their user, other users, and prevent this from happening to other people. So don't just suffer in silence, you know, thinking, oh, okay, I'll just ignore it. The real thing to do is report it to your, to your person who manages the group so that they can.
Excuse me, so they can enter a warning, so they can issue a warning that says, hey, that ain't me. That kind of stuff. If you're sending an email to a large group, one of the things I'd really be concerned about, you don't give them information that you need. So if you're doing things like this on Instagram, be aware that they can use it against you and maybe give some people some warning. And if you're sending out mail list, and you know, this is one of my pet peeves and probably yours too, and you got a long, large email.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: List, don't put it in the CC.
[00:09:27] Speaker C: So everybody can see everybody's addresses. Yeah, put it in a blind Colin copy. That way none of those addresses get put out. So if that email message does get captured by something, they can't use those addresses to make their own mail list against you. So that's one of the things I wanted to say. Just be careful.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: A good friend of ours that Bobby and I got, who worked with us a lot, always said, you know, the urgency thing, no one is going to send you an urgent email to do something. He said if you're flying in from somewhere and your plane's going to be late and you want somebody to come and pick you up at the airport, you're not going to send them an email, you're going to call them.
And you know, and like Bobby said, be careful about what you put out there. You don't want any information that could help you, help a spoofer or a hacker try to, you know, maybe social engineer some passwords or use your IDs out of you. Just really pay attention to that. And, and you know, that this is actually brings up something I've been looking at lately.
Passkeys, let's talk about them a little bit. So they're kind of an exciting upgrade over the last few years for, you know, mostly we all have been told, we all have, we have to keep our user ID and our passwords private and we should have a separate user ID and password for every website. And if we do, all that we'd really need a password manager to keep up with that. And there's a lot going on. On with that. Well, passkeys are interesting and a little different, but they're something that I think that could help out a lot of folks with a lot of that management and having to deal with all those details. So if you're tired of trying to remember that one password that you swore you'd never forget, or you, you know, you're sick of getting texts with six digit codes just to check your email, you're going to love this. So pass keys are a new way to sign into apps and websites, but without a password. That's right, no more password 1, 2, 3 or mom's maiden name 1962.
Instead you use things like face ID, touch ID or a PIN that's stored securely on your device.
So behind the scenes, it's all backed up by something called public key cryptography. You don't need to know the math, just know that it's incredibly secure and it's way harder to fish or steal than a traditional password.
So here's the best part though. You don't have to remember anything if your device has face ID or you just look at your phone and boom, you're there. So it works across devices too. If you're logging in on your laptop, your phone can confirm the login with a quick scan or a fingerprint. It's kind of like having a VIP pass that only you can use and nobody else can fake it.
So Apple, Google, Microsoft, they're all on board with this.
And it's rolling out slowly everywhere from Amazon to PayPal. You know, there's see it more and more. So the thing is, next time you're creating an account that offers you a passkey, go ahead and tap that. That's just. You should do that. No doubt you'll thank yourself later. And caregivers should consider using passkeys because they're way safer and easier than traditional passwords. You know, no more forgotten logins, sticky notes with passwords, or helping a loved one reset their every week.
Pass keys can't be phished, they can't be stolen in a data breach or reused by accident. And they work with face id, touch id, a simple pin. It's just one less thing to be stressed about in a world where caregivers already have plenty on their plate and a lot to be stressed about.
And that brings us to our next subject here.
[00:13:11] Speaker C: Well, before we go, one thing to keep in mind with passkeys, when you set it up initially.
Don't expect your loved one to do that on their own. You need to walk them through it a little bit because it is different than most things. And just tell them hit on the pass key. I know we just did that actually, but make sure it's the right thing because I could see the spoof now, hey, you got a pass key, Click here.
But you want to at least walk them through it. And once you get it set up, then all those benefits apply because that way you don't have to rely on them remembering the password or you remembering the passwords. But you may have to do some initial setup.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: So.
[00:13:50] Speaker C: But it'll be worth it.
[00:13:51] Speaker A: Oh, always. Big time. And like you said, initial setup that it will take just a little bit. But we'll include some details in the show notes about where you can learn more about passkeys and some of the things that support them at this point.
So it's been kind of a this week's kind of been a little trying week for me and I think it's probably been a little trying week for you too.
That brings us to something about it's probably near and dear to a lot of Yalls hearts out there and maybe you don't even know it.
Something called caregiving Syndrome. You want to tell us a little bit about that, Bobby?
[00:14:26] Speaker C: Yeah, this has been around for a while. Caregiving has been going on for a long time and there are a lot of people who have studied it. One of the things that they have named is this syndrome that comes up and it's characterized by physical and emotional mental exhaustion from resulting from long term care with another person, often a family member with a chronic disease or disability. It can lead to a lot of depression, it can lead to anxiety and it can burn out if it's not addressed. And you really need to understand that it is not just you feeling your way. There are many people feeling this way and you're not alone in that item. So what are the common symptoms of this Chronic fatigue, sleep disturbances, irritability, mood swings, full withdrawal, feelings of helplessness and resentment, and physical symptoms like headaches of high blood pressure, lower immunity. And this is all studied by a the latest study that I saw was 2023 from the Cleveland Clinic that talked about this syndrome. And we're going to put some show notes in there that will describe some of these items. But what I want to do is just quickly talk through some of the tips about how to do this and even just awareness of this is a feeling that you will get As a caregiver, that is not uncommon to you. This is very common and honestly, you should deal with it and see it as a part of your caregiving duty that this could happen to you. You need to recognize it.
So ask for help. There's nothing wrong with asking for help. Don't try to do everything yourself. Involve your family or other professionals. Take respite care when you get died. That means sometimes you need a break and it's okay to do that. And so for short term relief especially, and there are actually resources to help you do that, not just with your family, you should also talk to them about that kind of thing. But there might be resources in your local area that might be willing to help you on that when you do that kind of thing. Be specific. Hey, can you cook this dinner Friday? Hey, I can't. I'm accepting help and failures is the strength, not a failure. So be specific about what you did. And you'll be surprised by how many people will come to your age. You know, they'll deliver you a meal, they'll look after somebody for a couple hours, they'll check on them or call on them every once in a while so they're not so lonely. So, you know, reach out to do that. Set realistic goals and prioritized tests. Break in the small steps. Focus on what you rather you can do, rather what you can't. Learn to say no without any guilt. Sometimes you're going to have to say, I can't do that and it's okay. So make sure you do. Look at that. Establish a care routine. Make sure you get regular exercises. Maintain a healthy diet. Take care of yourself. Get sleep. Do the activities that you enjoy, the reading and socializing. Just because you're a caretaker doesn't mean you can't do things for yourself.
Join a caregiver group. There are support groups out there, lots of them, that can reduce some feelings of isolation. It provides lots of practical tips. People who have similar experiences. Hey, you joining us and listening to us as part of that, but you can also do that person to person as well. And you know, when you look at this and I'm gonna, we're gonna jump back at the technology a little bit. There are technologies that you can use and tools to help, hopefully. We've told you about several ones, but I'm gonna give you another one in just a minute that really will help. And then if you really are having problems and you've seen that you can't get those feelings to go away, there is nothing wrong with Talking with a mental health professional about getting help to help you with grief and anxiety and burnout, that's what they're there for. They will recognize this right away. There are lots of things that you can do as a caregiver the professionals will recognize.
So having that conversation is not a weakness, it's actually a strength. It's a way to make sure that you continue to do the thing you need to do.
I know I need to hear that every once in a while.
Barry and I tell each other all that all the time. Sometimes you have to internalize it a little bit. So if we're doing that for you, good, take some of those steps and.
[00:18:17] Speaker A: Do it 100% and get over the thing where you feel like you can't ask for help or that if you ever feel like if you're doing something fun or something interesting or something just for you, that that's wrong. Get past that, because you need that as much as anybody else does.
And there's no point in feeling guilty about that. I know I do. Sometimes I know other people who are in situations that feel guilty about doing anything fun because the other person that maybe they're trying to care for isn't doing anything fun. Or in their mind, they're not. You know, doesn't make any difference that it's not even something that they would enjoy doing. So they're not missing out on it. So there's those kinds of things. And I do think you're exactly right about, you know, just talk to somebody. A lot of these things in this list we're talking about here are just reasonable things that anybody can do. Even if you're not a good caretaker, those are good things to just take care of yourself in job and in your life. You know, just take those to heart. Not just for. Not just when you're under stress, especially the setting. Prioritize prioritized tasks and setting realistic goals.
The routine, the self care routine, making sure that you get your exercise, you make your healthy diet, prioritizing sleep and rest, all of those are good things. But ultimately, like Bobby said, just talk to somebody.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: And don't feel like you're being a burden on whoever you're talking to. Chances are they want to help you.
They want to help lift your load a little bit.
[00:19:57] Speaker C: And any lift helps. So.
Yeah.
[00:20:01] Speaker B: So maybe we'll bring some more content.
[00:20:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
Tell me more.
[00:20:32] Speaker C: Hey, tip number five was use technology and tips. Why it matters. There's a really cool setup for. For doing that.
And I'm going to look Here to see if I can find it in the notes and make sure I've got it.
So one of the things that I know I run into Baron is especially for those who are looking for, you know, my loved one is. Has some dementia and Alzheimer's going on with her. Remembering dates, what time is it, when are the appointments, those kinds of things.
You can obviously do that manually if you want to by creating poster boards and things on refrigerators that have all those kinds of dates. But if you have an Amazon tv, you could actually do that with another product that came out there. It's called Mango Display and The address is mango display.com it actually lets you set up that kind of reminder graphic on your Amazon tv. So if you have an Amazon tv, you can install this as one of the apps and then it has all kinds of nice configurations like calendar or listing or appointments or to do list that you can set up your own custom board.
So you go to that app and you can see things like when the next doctor appointment is, when does does the caregiver come next, what's her schedule or what day it is or you know, when or how many days till the holiday, that kind of thing. So you can set up your own kind of thing with it. It's very nice and pretty cool to use. We're dropping things into the show notes on it again. It'mango display.com it is free, which is always good and you could try it out. I know it has a free version of it. It may have some things in it that lets you get more things if you want to and later. I thought it was a real simple thing to use to just sort of help people. My mom likes to be in front of the television and her Amazon TV is there. And so I can actually have an app that might say when the next appointment is or what the day is.
[00:22:21] Speaker A: Pretty cool. Does it use like kind of work like a screensaver? So when the TV's not doing anything else that that's what's there?
[00:22:28] Speaker C: I don't think there's a mode for that, but I think you actually select the application and it brings up whatever you've configured. You do have to configure it first. Yeah, you might want to try it on your own TV or something like that. Makes you get used to it.
But it seems pretty easy to set up and very similar to the kind of thing we do with iPhone with assistive item where you set up things with just things for them. You do a board that means something for them, you know I wouldn't put too many things on it, especially if you're dealing with somebody who's having the reduced capacity. But there may be some things like knowing the date, knowing the next doctor appointment, that kind of thing that you can put up. And they were all kind of reminded. So I thought it would be an interesting app to try and maybe we'll pick some more apps in that line down the road as well.
Again, it's mango display.com and it's the digital calendar, displays the name of the app. So there you go.
[00:23:25] Speaker A: Yeah, that looks like something that would be really helpful for a lot of people. So maybe, maybe that'll work out. This reminded me of this. I don't know why it reminded me exactly, but it's one tiny little tech tip that I ran into this week. My aunt called me the other day, actually, I tried calling my aunt and I called her and she picked up, but she didn't realize that she had picked up. And I heard her say a couple of things and then I would kept saying her name and she never would hear me. And then eventually I would hang up and then she would call me back. And that happened a couple of times and I couldn't figure out what was going on with it. But she said, I need you to look at this next time you're up here. So we talked a little bit more than I figured out what was going on. So a couple of versions ago of iOS on iPhones, there was a change that made it where when someone calls you and you are working on your phone, you're doing something already got the phone open, you're scrolling maybe through a web page or you're working on an app or something. Somebody calls you, then what happens is up at the top of your screen, a little short little notification comes up at the top that says so and so is calling you. Would you like to answer or not? You have a green button and a red button, whether or not to answer them or not. But it's fairly small.
And this was a new behavior for her because not that many people call her while she's scrolling. So she was having trouble with the touch target hitting the green button. Right. And when she did hit the green button, it kind of threw her into confused state. She couldn't quite get to the how turn the speaker phone on and all that. It was very confusing. And I finally figured out what was happening there. And she said it used to be when I would just when somebody calls me and I'm not already on the phone, it works Great. But if I'm already on the phone doing something, somebody calls me, I can't hear them, I don't know what's going on. So I found out how to fix this problem and I've, I've seen it before. It's pretty easy. There is a setting. If you go into settings, you go down to apps and you look at the phone app. If you scroll down a little ways, there is a section there about notifications for incoming calls. One is either a banner, which is the default now, which is the little top banner at the top, or full screen.
So if you tell it you want full screen and then someone calls you while you're working on your phone, it takes over the whole screen and it gives you the familiar controls where you, you can say I want to answer it or not and I want to put it on speakerphone. So weirdly enough, a few months back it was, we had ours set to full screen from a long time ago. And then when we, when ours made the change it never automatically went, it was a full screen thing. But it would get on my last nerve when I'm working on my phone and someone would call me that it would take over the entire screen and I couldn't keep doing what I needed to be doing. So it's interesting. So I ended up switching mine back to just banner so I could continue like I wanted to. But. But my aunt, that did not work for her at all. So I've got her all back on full screen and it took care of the problem.
So it's amazing how many little tiny changes that happen on every update that you don't think anybody's going to take, pay any attention to. But, but they do have an effect on people in their, in their workflow. So you know, one of those things.
[00:26:33] Speaker C: Yeah. As a caregiver I kind of think it's my job to jump into those new operating systems and try them just so I know what to expect. So you need to do that too. Mostly Apple and even Google have ways for you to back up to the interface. So just look at how they do.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: And that's pretty much this.
It's backing up to that old way of doing things and having it take over the screen. So sometimes I wish I really. It's a double edged sword. I love how much that they update things and they're continually improving and continually changing things because part of me just likes to see that, but part of me wishes that there was a mode of just leave it alone, take care of the security, cover everything under the covers, but leave the interface alone. It just. It bugs me, and it may not just for me, but that I have to stop support people who have to deal with those changes.
My aunt loves to ask the question I don't or loves to say, I don't understand why they changed that. And I'm like, yeah, I don't either. But it did and it happened. So you're gonna have to deal.
[00:27:30] Speaker C: You know, it's another promotion, another prompt for what we've done before with assistive mode, that it doesn't change much there, and their focus is on making sure that the interface stays very similar.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: So, you know, if. If you think you have.
[00:27:46] Speaker C: You may have a person who, okay, maybe assistive mode is a better deal for them because you won't have those kind of changes even across some system upgrades, so. Because they know what it's for.
[00:27:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:57] Speaker C: So think about that.
[00:27:58] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a possibility for some folks. It really is. To make it a little bit simpler. But I did ask her. I know a couple of episodes ago, I might have mentioned that I taught her how to use the. The. The alarm clock. And she has been digging it. It's working great for her, and she's. She's just happy as a clam with that. And it really just took a couple of times just to show her how, and she was awesome with it, so. And she's 90 years old. She has no trouble.
[00:28:24] Speaker C: I love it.
[00:28:24] Speaker A: Yep.
Love it.
[00:28:27] Speaker C: Hey, so if you like what we're doing, you think what we're doing is useful, then we really encourage you to write us a review, subscribe, let people know, talk, give us word of mouth about the podcast so we can continue to do this and spread our community.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: That'd be great. And, and if you're listening to it with just audio, know that we do have a YouTube channel. You can see our. Our smiling faces. And I'm getting a little bit better about the. The editing here. We may be able to show you some screen overlays about what some of the products that we're talking about and some of the processes that we're talking about. So feel free to come over to YouTube. It's YouTube.comcare tech and tips. I think you'll. You'll find us really quickly or just search for care, tech and tips. And we're. We're out there there. We hope you have a lovely couple of weeks, and we'll be back and see you soon.
[00:29:10] Speaker C: All right, Stay cool.
[00:29:12] Speaker A: Stay cool.
