I’ve been hacked. This very account, the one I use to write my blogs on has been taken over by, of all people, Russians. How do I know? Because I do not understand the Cyrillic alphabet, and it was all over the dashboard of my site.
I am not accusing the Russians of being particularly mean or anything as it was probably my fault more than theirs. I think at the time my password was 1 2 3 4 or some such. Really tricky stuff to figure out for an ace of computing. Moving on.
I know people who got their email hijacked. Not fun. It is a pain to try to get back the account. They spend 2 to 3 months to recover. Meanwhile the hackers are busy trying to get some money from the list of friend and family they’ve got from the account. Here’s the way they operate:
I (the account holder) am in peril, send some money to help me.
I’ve seen some pretty imaginative things written by those guys to get some dough: kidnapped by a local army in some God forsaken land, a car accident and the wallet burnt with the vehicle.
They will answer any questions you have with this: I am too tired to think straight, just send some money.
I mean, if they contact 50 people and they all answer at once, that hacker will be busy getting back to every one.
The next step in hacking is when they get your credit card number and you discover on your statement that you just bought a weird item. I think banks are aware of that scam because they are diligent in repairing the damage done. Usually.
The ultimate hacking you can be a victim of, in my opinion, is when they have a direct access to your bank account. That one is bad because chances are the bank itself will not believe that you didn’t buy 50 king mattresses somewhere in the rust belt. Basically, you are screwed.
I have notice something, though, if it helps. Every time someone tells me they’ve been hacked, they usually add that they had just changed their password. The new password could be long and complicated. As a matter of fact, when I changed the password on this account, I’ve got a lot of notifications for a few months that 100 times a day someone was trying to hack me. I don’t think they succeeded, though, unless you see this blog written in Russian.
