Don’t feel bad about it.

About three years ago I got a call from my credit card company asking me if I had booked a first class flight from New York to Milan for $2,000 and reserved a five star hotel in Italy for $1,000 a night, plus a few other hundred dollar charges of other things.

I have travelled overseas before but I’m a budget traveller and I wouldn’t spend money like that … plus my travelling days were basically over anyway … plus I don’t live, work or go near New York city, I’m in northern Ontario, Canada!

I cancelled the card immediately and started looking back on what I had done that led to this. The only thing I could point to was that about a month or two before, I had been playing around with a bunch of phone apps and a few Chinese face filter apps I had experimented with and had signed up to trial subscriptions without knowing it which gave my credit card information through Google Play. I’m very careful with my credit card and apply every security feature that is given but that one slip up gave me away. I now layer Google play purchases behind Pay Pal tagged to a limited Credit Card to just that account and with all security, two factor authentication I can apply on everything.

As security minded as all this can be, all security professionals agree that the weakest link to any secure system are the fallible humans (and I’m one of them) who operate this stuff.