Stolen Phone

05 Mar 2026

It finally happened. My phone got stolen, and it caused all kinds of trouble, even more than I have expected.

The theft was not a big surprise. I'm dealing with cybersecurity-related topics for more than 30 years. I knew that this can happen. Being in cybersecurity for such a long time, I thought that I was prepared for it reasonably well. I was not.

It was a pickpocket job. It happened on my way home from a weekend trip, shortly before boarding a shuttle to the airport. It took me some time before I realized that my phone is gone. Luckily, I was not traveling alone, therefore I could borrow a phone to quickly contact my banks and company to lock out all access. However, it turned out it was already a bit late. I had my phone set up for contactless payments, and a significant sum of money was already gone (which I did not know at the time).

Fortunately, the thief was just after the quick money. However, I have realized how exposed I could have been if the thief was better skilled or motivated. I had no access to company email or files from the phone, and I have contacted my colleagues to disable my access very quickly, to be on the safe side. However, the phone had access to a lot of personal stuff, social network accounts, personal email, chat applications, transport apps, etc. There is an application for everything these days, and I had a lot of them on my phone.

I have a unique random password in each application. There is not much I could have done to secure my online presence unless I got access to my password manager. In fact, I was relatively lucky that my phone was klepped on my way back home. I got home few hours later, and I started to change my passwords and disable app access one by one. It felt like I have changed passwords all over the Internet that night. However, it scares me a bit to think what would I have done if the phone was stolen on a longer trip, especially if I'm traveling alone. That surely made me re-think some things.

I'm safe again now, as much as I could be anyway. I thought about writing down a list for my future self (and also for others), while my experience is still fresh. Here is a list of preventive measures, as well as post-incident reactions when a phone gets stolen. I hope this helps.

Even though I'm safe now, there are still several questions that this experience opened, and I have no answers to them. One of the questions is the problem of the payments. My phone was locked, how were these payments even possible? It is a bit of a mystery. Stay tuned, more on that later.