DENVER, CO - In 2020 I was the victim of identity theft. Like most others, I had naively put my trust into big tech to keep my personal data safe; and like many others I was burned. Worst of all, the hackers didn't rely on state-of-the-art spoofing technology, they used a cosmological backdoor.

About 90% of Americans are online. That's 90% of us enjoying the freedom and connectivity that the Internet brings.

We stroll around in our gardens of personalized experiences that are the products of the user data we've been sowing ever since our first interactions with the World Wide Web. However, just beyond the gates of our online estates there are wolves, tigers, and various species of insects seeking to gain entry.

Our padlock? A single string of letters that looks like ev3lyn91, or BrOnCo$$, or maybe even J$kr2,!!D-r2d if you really put some effort into it. Or maybe you were like me and had an "indestructible" password which, for the record, was r%2h$U6SwYzraj-y$WPP (yes, I memorized the whole thing).

But no password of any strength could have prepared me for the intrusion to come.

The Mirror

On the morning of July 3rd, 2020 I found myself unable to log into my bank's app. How strange.

I spent a few minutes resetting my password and logged in to find that my savings account balance was $0. How concerning.

With my mind aflame and a coffee in hand, I hurriedly switched over to my transaction history. Every single penny had been wired to an unknown account with a sole reference that read: thanks.

I was in shambles. I called up my bank manager and explained the situation and he described to me how I had called the branch to change my password earlier that morning. I was outraged, how could they have let a stranger do this, was there no security protocol?

Later that day I entered the branch and the manager led me into his office. He played back a recording of the phone call that morning - and I was speechless.
The caller on the other end was me in every way except for the voice.

The caller opened with my signature hey!, and spoke in a forward tone while still reserving a hint of shyness and introversion. They explained that they were requesting a password change and the customer service operator led them through a series of security questions to verify "my" identity.


A short hop, skip, and jump later and the hacker had reset my account's password

The caller's small talk about needing to access my account to buy airplane tickets to Costa Rica was the cherry on top; I love travelling and I couldn't believe that the hacker somehow knew that, let alone leveraged it.

I was floored.

The Black Hole

I spent the following months on the phone to the bank and was finally given a full refund on the money that had been drained from my account; but I continued to live in fear that the hackers could strike at any time.

I burnt down the social media courtyard that I had taken so long to nurture for fear that anything private could be made public tomorrow.

Would the next victim be my Amazon account? My Twitter account perhaps?

What use were passwords when there was someone out there who could seamlessly replicate you not only in personal information but also in tone and opinion?

What if they found some way to look like me too?

Closure?

I received a call from the Denver Deputy Chief of Police a month ago. They had caught the hackers.

The Deputy Chief of Police calmly elaborated the details of the heist from start to finish over the course of an hour. I'll save you the details of who they are and where they came from; what shocked me most was how they did it.

The attack had originated from Saint Joseph Hospital - the hospital I was born at in 1991. A certain bad actor at the hospital had broken into the historical birth records and had scanned over 3,000 birth records from 1987 to 1992.

This data was then passed on to a team of hackers in Belarus who had painstakingly, over the course of months, trained and perfected a neural network to combine modern open source astronomical data along with traditional cosmograms, tarot readings, and horoscopology to accurately pinpoint a person's state of mind, beliefs, past, and future at any given moment in their lifetime.

They were able to extract the sun and moon signs from the Colorado birth dates and times listed in the records from Saint Joseph's and thus, had the fodder to feed their data hungry AI.

Armed with the names and Zodiac data of several thousand US citizens, they could let their neural network produce the character traits and qualities that would allow them to sail through any sort of human verification test as any one of their victims.

I was only one of several hundred people who had been hit with this hack in the past year.

What is big tech doing to combat Zodiac based attacks? Why are so many resources poured into password and biometric protections and so little into combatting psyche replication? Astrological divination has been common knowledge for thousands of years and likely isn't going anywhere, therefor the burden rests upon tech to modernize to meet the dangers it poses to their systems.

Here's my horoscope for big tech: Stay away from my data.