Insulate your household from DOGE attack outages with offline local banking

The DOGE attack is moving fast. Here I will explain a strategy to reduce the blast radius of this attack by insisting on a offline protocol from your bank.

More reports from impacted federal workers are making news giving us a clearer picture of the DOGE attacks happening in real time at federal agencies. The most recent reports indicate that the USAID agency has been functionally dissolved and is now under the purview of Marco Rubio. Also reports indicate DOGE has control of the USAJOBS hiring portal.

The severity of this attack is SEV1: meaning that outages are imminent and you should immediately take steps to insulate your household from disruptions in critical infrastructure in banking, healthcare, transportation and telecommunications.

This morning I visited my local regional bank and Bank of America branches. I had 1 question for them: What is your protocol for offline banking?

What is offline banking?

First off, it is concerning that BOA did not know what offline banking protocols referred to. Based on my conversation with the acting branch manager, my feeling is: lack of competency in offline transactional processes indicates an over reliance on cloud enabled systems.

An over-reliance on cloud-enabled systems and lack of established failsafe is a major security vulnerability that can be easily exploited by a malicious agent, in this case DOGE.

I explained that, as a BOA customer, how will I get my money out of the bank in an emergency if there is an interruption in network connectivity, aka their machines are offline with no current path to restore service?

Their response is that they would contact the BOA online support helpline to talk to the online banking division.

This is NOT an acceptable response. This indicates that the local branch would have zero capacity to activate failsafe systems for offline banking support in the event of an outage that took all their systems offline.

After multiple attempts to uncover whether they had an offline banking process established, I made the decision that I need to move my money out of BOA and to a regional bank.

Luckily, my regional bank understood what I was asking and they told me they had considered the same question, they have been following the news. Finally, a good sign!

Red Flag: Lack of comms from big banks

It’s worth noting that BOA has not shared comms with customers giving them a sense that everything is going to be OK with their money and data.

At this point, every American has received an email from an institution alerting them that their PII has been leaked as part of a cyber attack. Typically the institution will share details of the attack and provide a recommendation on how to secure their data (with credit monitoring and freezing). Why has BOA not shared any comms with customers? Why has there been zero acknowledgment of the DOGE cyber attack by big banks about what’s clearly happening on the national stage?

I’m afraid the answer is bleak for BOA customers and Americans broadly: they are not going to protect our assets in the event of a major outage, they are looking out for themselves.

BOA will not stand in the way of DOGE because they are afraid of retribution.

Localize your money

Given this signal, my recommendation is to take steps immediately to move your money into a local bank or credit union and start working with them on a plan for offline banking to continue during extended periods of interruption in critical telecommunications infrastructure.

Establish protocols for the following:

If the internet is down, how will they authenticate your identity, record transactions and give you your money? Push for clarity and get it in writing before you give them your money.

Fyi it will take BOA a full week to “order” my money and if their branch is closed for whatever reason, they have no alternative way to give me my money.

The red flags keep piling up.

Don’t waste time, it’s unclear how long the DOGE attacks will continue but massive infrastructure transformations like this tend to do a lot of damage if not managed carefully in a short period of time.

Don’t be caught on your back foot. Now is the time to act.

I’ll share updates as I continue to use a block and tackle cyber defense to protect my household. I recommend you begin taking action to do the same.

Good luck.