Tinfoil Hat Club, Take 1123412431234

Yesterday, I spent two hours with an elderly lady who was absolutely convinced she was the target of hacking. The moment I got to her place and was let in, I knew I was in for a battle because she had literal aluminum foil over the following items: unused electrical sockets, lightbulbs, every infrared sensor on all the televisions, on half of the appliances, the dryer vent, and pretty much everywhere else that some paranoid individual could think radio signals would come into the house.

She immediately brought me to the laundry room where her camera system was set up, saying someone hacked into it, and reset the output signal to the monitor to VGA. Right away, I saw a problem, as there was no VGA input on the monitor whatsoever, just one DP port and two HDMI ports. The moment I powered it on and waited ten seconds, all the cameras came up and the feed was good. I tried to explain to her that I did nothing, save powering it on, but she insisted that someone had hacked it and changed it to VGA.

I told the lady that if someone could do that, every university offering computer science and computer engineering programs would be throwing PhD’s at them for two reasons: One, that there was no VGA plug whatsoever on the monitor. Two, the camera system was a closed system with no way to connect to the Internet at all, either wired or wirelessly.

She then moved on and tried to show me that her three (yes three) cell phones were being hacked. One couldn’t connect to the Internet at all immediately after she was “advised” by some unnamed IT person to install an app on the device. The other two, she claimed that because the model number and not she couldn’t see the name she changed the device to were showing up on the “About this phone” section, that was evidence of hacking. Also, she insisted I looked at the Google signin’s for her Gmail, she wondered the same thing, why the model number of the device, and not the custom device name she put in. I tried in vain to tell her that it was normal for that to happen. Instead, she logged herself out of Google on one device, logged back in, and then cried as to why she had to do 2FA to get back on, and then also claimed that because two devices were active, it was evidence of hacking, whe she had just used one to allow the other to log in.

We went back and forth like this for two whole hours, and I ended up telling her that if she wasn’t going to believe me then there was nothing further I could do for her. I told her straight to her face that the vast majority of hackers wouldn’t waste their time trying to drive a little old lady crazy. I stopped just short of telling her that she could stand to use some counseling with a mental health professional, since between the literal aluminum foil she had covering things in her house, and confusing normal phone operation for hacking, she could definitely use it.