Here is the first part of a two-part story. This is the story of HackerPocalypse 2011.I am a savvy online person. I can spot scams a mile away. I debunk chain letters and forwards. This scam was so insidious that I was caught in its web. If I was caught, you could be too. This first part is the story of what happened, the next blog will be about how to prevent it and what to do when it happens to you. As my cousin said, "There are two kinds of people in this world. Those that have been hacked and those that will be."It was 5:30 in the morning on a Thursday. I was coming off a rough week. We had three events that week. The lead up was harsh. 60-70 hour work weeks. Coming home only to sleep, change and go back to work. I was busting tush. We got to unwind after the last event on Wednesday with a few adult beverages and afterwards I headed home. I was beat. So extremely exhausted. I finally went to bed around 10:30. I fell into bed totally wiped out.At 5:30 in the morning I started getting texts. One eye open, I noticed the name and decided I would go back to sleep. Why the heck would he be texting me at 5:30 in the morning? Whatever, check it later. I had tossed and turned all night... my brain never fully shutting off. I just wanted my last 2 hours of sleep... I wasn't to get them.Next was a text from my brother on the east coast. Weird. He rarely texts and never this early. What is going on? With one eye open I see the words "email" and "robbed." I close my eyes. "Was Ronin robbed? Did I get an email? Is my little brother okay?" I am starting to realize I won't be able to go back asleep when the next two texts come in. Both from a local friend. I put together that the first two texts were friends on the east coast but this was close to home. Why was Eric texting me at 5:45 in the morning? Seriously, dude... I'm sleeping.I open both eyes to read this one... "Your personal email has been hacked - change your password ASAP!"I sit bolt upright. WHAT?I try to access my email on my phone. Last email received: 2:17 a.m.It is now 6:07 a.m. and I can't access them. In just about 4 hours, they locked me out of my email.I am half awake, dizzy with the vertigo I try to avoid by not sitting bolt upright from a prone position, made worse by my confusion and exhaustion. I try accessing everything from my, what now looks like an extraordinarily tiny, iPhone screen.Dude. Seriously? I stumble to my living room put my computer on the floor and stretch out. Lights are still off in an attempt to fix the problem and still catch some zzzzzzz's... 5 or 10 minutes later these exact words cross my mind, "Not Likely."This is going to be harder than I expected. I can't access any of my gmail accounts. Eric sends me the text of the message to my work account. This is the first time I see what all 500 of my contacts (friends, family, work acquaintances, strangers who emailed me once, businesses) saw...
HiMy regrets for this sudden request, I have been involved in a robberyduring my trip to Madrid, Spain. I got mugged and all my belongingscash, mobile phone and credit cards were all stolen at gun point. Ineed your help as am trying to raise some money.I've made contact with my bank but they are not providing a fastsolution. I need you to lend me some money to sort my self out of thispredicament, will pay back once I get this over with.Please let me know if you can assist me in anyway so i can forward youdetails to effect a transfer. You can reach me via email or thehotel's desk phone +3493106____.ThanksTalia--Talia H DavisMarketing Manager*Allied Jewish Federation of Colorado"In the midst of difficulty, lies opportunity." --Albert Einstein"All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed." --Sean O'Casey
That is it in its entirety (with some of the phone number removed so no one contacts them). Did you find this blog because you searched this information? Good. Keep reading and read my second blog about what to do when this happens to you. I found out some tricky information.Well, I imagine it was shocking to the 300 people I saw the day before at a huge event that I had, evidently hopped on a plane, gone to Madrid, gotten mugged at gun point, and emailed them. Shocking how fast the world moves.Now that I have given up sleeping, I have settled in for the long haul. I am in my recliner taking the right steps (again a plug for part two, how to fix this once it happens). I find out that they may be jerks but they are smart and fast. They covered their bases. As I am requesting access to my account (because at this point, I had absolutely none and no obvious way to regain access other than Google intervention) I am Googling the scam. I find records that (duh) this has happened many times before. I let those who have been there, guide me. I learn tips and tricks but I also learn something horrifying... in many of these testimonials the hackers deleted all of their email.WHAT?! Dude, hack my email account my don't destroy my electronic life! Now I am nervous. Will that happen to me or not? Will my emails from my brother who has passed away be safe? The business records I keep in my email? The institutional history I have for various organizations... the horrid memories I, for some sadistic reason, saved in my email.... will they all be gone?I raised this concern to one friend. He laughed it off... this was serious to me. By then it was time for most normal people to get up and the phone was ringing and my Facebook was blowing up. Another dear friend, Mel, who is also a writer, got on with me. When I told her I knew and what I feared awaited me when I had access again, she understood. You see we are both collectors of words. That was a 10 year collection and I feared it was gone.I began changing every password to something different and obscure, praying I could remember all of them. They had access to my bank info, Facebook, etc. In fact, Mel said they had been on my Facebook chat at one point. Everything got changed. Down to my password for this blog. I wasn't going to let these people have anything more than they have taken already.I was granted access to my account again around 8 am. I was scared to see what I would find.Inbox: EmptyFamily folder: EmptyMoney folder: EmptySent folder: EmptyIt was the same in every folder. I had a lot of them.... and a lot of emails. One person online had said their emails were in the trash folder. I checked it. Over 11,000 emails in the trash. WHEW! They hadn't made them disappear forever.First step, passwords all changed.Second step, settings checked.... what's this? They had changed my email to forward every single incoming email to an account they set up - taliah.davis@ymail.com (clearly they didn't know me). I cleaned that up right away. Hackers, you are SHUT DOWN!Third step, I emailed everyone to tell them this:
Well friends and family and acquaintances who I happened to email at any point in my life...You might have received an email from me very early this morning telling you I was in Madrid and needed money. I amA. not in MadridB. not been robbed at gun pointandC. while we are all always in need of money... don't need you to do anything.My email was hacked. Every email that I ever had dumped into the trash for me to try to recover. Please ignore that email and NEVER, NEVER put your password into any website or anything. I can't figure out when or where or how this happened to me but it is becoming all too common.Call this an opportunity for us to catch up. Very sorry for any inconvenience.Best,Talia
It turned out to be a great vehicle for catching up with old friends. Once that as out, I started the process of trying to recover my email.I went to the trash and was saving hundreds of current emails at a time. Then I thought, well the older ones are the more precious so do that first. I got some saved from November to March of this year (the time I was finishing up in Israel and then moving back to Colorado) when, while chatting with Mel online and on the phone with my mothers...BLINKThe trash permanently deleted.I hyperventilated This can't be happening.Gone. All gone.My mother is screaming a million miles away... "Talia! Talia! Talk to me! What happened??"I'm crying hysterically. I tell her that my emails deleted themselves. They must have left a program to do something or were still in the account and saw what I was doing.I used the Gmail feature to force anyone logged in out of the account and cried. My moms tried to console me. I needed to hang up. Several friends were chatting with me and asking what was going on through Facebook or GChat or text message. Most people said, "That sucks."Mel got it.We mourned together for those lost words, sent into cyberspace by the evil hackers.I called my father. He was meeting with another rabbi in Denver that day, unbeknownst to me. He calmed me down. He reminded me that I had the memories of the things I lost but also that it was literally, that day, the start of a new month, Elul. Elul is the last month before Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It's a time for refreshing and renewing and letting go of the past.These hackers, whom I am tempted to call many nasty names, gave me freedom from the electronic chains that held me to some of my past.Once I did all I could do online, I closed my laptop and crawled back into bed. It was almost 10am. Four and a half hours after this ordeal began with a text message. I took a 20 minute nap and got up feeling refreshed. I dressed and met my father for a rare treat, a lunch together.We talked and he counciled me. Go to your specialists, right? My father is a specialist in sitting in council.My mothers, on the other hand, they called every computer person they ever met or heard of trying to fix this for me.Mel mourned the words with me.Eric told me to get a dirty chai (even though I felt nauseous) and face the day.My brother played it cool and quiet, in his perfect way. Offering support when I needed it but hanging back so as not to overwhelm me.And my dear friend Amanda, who saw me later in the day, hugged me, laughed with me, and reminded me that life goes on.The silver lining of the experience was the number of people who said they would have totally believed it if I ran off and had gone to Israel but Madrid? No way. Another friend said he knew it wasn't true because I would have kicked the mugger's butt first. HA! What great friends!It's been over a week since this happened. I've found that I am missing things that I will never recover but mostly, I am not missing much. I feel lighter. I feel refreshed. I still feel angry but I have moved forward.I know people might be reading this thinking, what a self-indulgent woman. What a waste of a blog or how melodramatic... For me, this was the death of something very important. What I lost in those 4 hours can never be recovered. The words of a brother who died, of friends who have died, memories, scraps of thought to write about forever gone into the dark hole of my brain... gone, never to be seen again.But I hope people can learn from this experience. So HackerPocalypse 2011 - The Lesson (aka part 2) will focus on that. Stay tuned.