It has always been necessary to ground phone systems, just because of lightning. When people get killed on the phone, I suspect the grounding was not done correctly. The same is true about people getting killed in the shower or any of the other lightning stories you hear.
When we started hanging electronics on these services, cross connecting phone, cable TV and power, it became necessary to concentrate on inter system grounding but that should have happened 2 decades ago. Computer people certainly knew about it by the early 80s.
You can't let thieves rule your life. Mount things to make them hard to steal and get on with your life. I still like the "turned up rebar" ufer as a good compromise between safety and theft prevention. The copper doesn't get installed until the house is ready to be closed up.
