Someone hacked into my Facebook account (phishing) and sent unwanted messages to a LOT of my friends, claiming to be me. Facebook shut me down and made me reset all my information.
We ordered pizza Thursday night from Papa Johns, who, apparently when you order over the phone, require you to give them the 3 digit security number on the back of your debit card. We believe that one of their employees took down all that info and used it to rack up $987.00 of unauthorized purchases. on Friday and Saturday. Well, the cops believe that, now that we have a police report. Bank of America put the money back in our account, cancelled my card, and will be issuing me a new one I should receive by the beginning of next week. Just in time to miss all the Black Friday shopping.
I tell you all this to explain my need to want to drop off the face of the earth for a while.
I need to figure out exactly what kind of life I want to be sharing with the world. I can't afford to be completely unconnected, as much as I would like to be, especially now. But there should be a professional me and then a separate, secure, and limited personal me.
Thank you to those who care to stay tuned.
I'm so sorry you got hacked. I understand how you are feeling. It's terrible when your identity is stolen! You may already know this, but I thought it might be comforting to know what happened to your Facebook account from a computer programmer's point of view. You may feel less violated.
ReplyDeleteThere are people around the world who write computer programs which hack at passwords. In fact, you can buy one such program off the internet. Some dude in his garage runs the program to select random Facebook accounts and then the program hacks the password. Once the dude is in the random Facebook account he runs another program which sends all of those Facebook friends wall posts and messages to all kinds of websites. This "dude" is paid to do this by those websites.
The only thing you can do to protect yourself is to have a "strong" password and even then you may not be safe. These computer programs are good and will only get better. A password is considered "strong" if it more than 8 characters and has mixed character types (numbers, letters, symbols).
Most of those "dudes" will probably only let the password hack program run for a few minutes tops because they are just wasting their time if the program takes hours to hack the password. "strong" passwords would take hours to hack - that is why they are safer.
I hope this helps. I just don't want you to feel like it could have been someone you know or something like that. It was probably someone halfway around the world.
I hope you stay on FB and keep your blog going! Call me if you have questions!