Last month, my mom ended up unexpectedly in the hospital. It was a rollercoaster of all the Greatest Hits of the American Medical System, including supporting the Residents striking in the hour before Mom was due for surgery, because they're paid too little and work too many hours. No joke.

But this is a cybersecurity newsletter, so let's talk about the part I actually know something about. As I went through this process, I wanted to help prepare anyone else who might go through a similar thing. You think the annual ritual of "fixing a few things" around Thanksgiving is rough for the average tech person? This is rougher.

And by the way, Mom's out and doing fine, thanks for asking!

Let's get to it.

When Mom went to the hospital, I had no idea she'd be there through several surgeries and over a month of recovery. Needless to say, her health and wellbeing ate my calendar whole. And at the same time, the switch from her being completely independent to me suddenly needing to take over everything happened in a blink.

We got lucky. We were prepared. I cannot imagine how much harder this whole thing would've been if we weren't.

Consider this me begging you, dear readers: make this kind of preparation a top priority. We buy health insurance because we take health risks (and costs!) seriously. We need to take the risks and costs of someone's cyber existence just as seriously.

Simply put: clean digital habits now equal a lot less cybersecurity chaos later.

On the small scale, there are the fairly mundane risks: spam filling up, bills going unpaid, important notices getting missed.

On the giant scale, there's the ginormous risk of identity theft. Healthcare data is incredibly valuable, but it's also time-sensitive. While your person is in the hospital, if that hospital has a data breach or someone's actively siphoning data out the back door (fancy term: exfiltration), your person's data can end up in a whole range of identity theft scams. Which means coming home from the hospital to a host of financial and other troubles.

These are the tradeoffs we make so hospitals can share your medical records with each other easily (the fancier term is interoperability). And if you already know hospitals aren't paying their medical staff enough, I can pretty much guarantee their cybersecurity program is held together with duct tape and hope.

Assume your person's personal (PII) and healthcare (PHI) data is for sale within 48 hours of them being checked in.

Simply put: your person's whole digital life falls apart unless somebody's holding the pieces together. You must know your person's access passwords for their phones and their computers. Without this... lots of awfulness is possible. Make sure you can open their phone, and log into their computer.

Equally importantly, make sure your phone number is on everything as a backup for two-factor authentication (2FA) — that little code text your bank sends you. There will come a moment where you need that verification but don't have physical access to their phone.

Whether your person uses a digital password manager like Proton, or writes everything down in a paper binder, you have to be able to access those passwords. Get clarity on this now. Do a quarterly check-in to make sure everything's still current.

In enterprise tech, we joke that a cold backup nobody's tested isn't a backup, it's just expensive storage. Family tech is no different. Test your access to literally everything while your person can still walk you through it. Ask them now: where'd you write down that new password when the account forced a change and you forgot to update the password manager?

I thought I had this dialed in. Then I went to pay one of Mom's bills and discovered that, despite being literally on the account, I didn't have the right password. My attempts to get in locked the account down — which is one way of protecting it, but sucks when bills start bouncing.

Getting ahead of this matters more than you think. Luckily, I'd already been working with Mom to protect her online space, but this is such an easy thing to overlook "until later." I'm here to tell you: sometimes you run out of time more abruptly than you could imagine.

Mom's fine. The bills got paid. The accounts stayed locked down tight instead of locked out. None of that was luck — it was prep, done months before anyone needed it.

What to do once your person is actually admitted, and how to keep their digital life intact while they're too busy healing to worry about it.

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