Hack Attack

It was a normal Tuesday morning. I was rubbing the sleep off my eyes and had just turned on the palm-sized rectangular technological black box I am obsessed with, more commonly known as my mobile phone, when I saw my friend's message: "Reet, did you get hacked?" Not something I expected on a normal morning.

"Hacked" seemed like the kind of word that belonged to people in their grey years who believe they should trust everyone asking for their details, or to people who download games from pirated sites. I don't fall into either category. I have a presence on a few social media platforms, and somehow, within a week, every one of them was hacked.

Back to Tuesday morning. Someone had logged into my Instagram to share news about Elon Musk. Not that I have anything against Musk, but I like to promote my blog on my stories. I deleted it from everywhere, changed my password and whatnot. Gmail, meanwhile, was sending me a notification that someone was trying to log into my account. Hello — that someone was me. Where was your security when someone was actually trying to sign in? Sleeping, like me?

The next day, I had to protect my LinkedIn. Why anyone would want to hack into it is beyond my capacity. I use it for posting normal achievements, say, getting up at 6 am. "Today I woke at the hour the sun was set to rise, and rising with the first beam gave me a next level of insight." Stuff like that, you know.

Then I worked through the apps I hadn't opened in months, getting more annoyed with each one. But it stopped being an annoyance when my bank messaged to say I was trying to send someone 300 AUD. I don't owe anyone 300 AUD, and if I did, I would not be paying them at 11:32 pm. Before I could take that in, a second message arrived: a request to change the mobile number on my banking account.

Like any panicked young adult, I called my financial advisor slash my dad. He told me to calm down and ring the 24/7 helpline. Whoever it was couldn't push the payment through without the code sitting in my messages, which was the only comforting sentence anyone said to me that week.

After doing some preliminary precautions, I lay in bed and stared out my window. The curtain was open. Was it always open? Did I really leave my curtain open every night? What if someone is out there? What will a tiny lock do for someone who wants to break in? What was the helpline number again? After hyperventilating for a while, I finally calmed down into a nightmarish sleep.

The next day, I went on a quest to save my account and learned the benefits of multi-factor authentication for good. If there's an upside, it's that I have become extremely fast at changing passwords.

I worked out that it was my Gmail that had been attacked, because it sits at the root of everything else. The password from that account was the same one I used to create it ages ago. I really procrastinated to an extreme.

My suspicions were confirmed the next morning, when I received an email from the Blitz volunteering officer asking me to buy Apple Store gift vouchers for our volunteers. Everything about that email said "scam," but I only caught it because I was at the peak of my paranoia and because I knew she would never draft anything that serious, she is a chill person. I blocked the account. By then, I had already locked them out of nearly everything else.

They went for my identity and my money, and what saved the last of it was that I had become too paranoid to be polite to a stranger. The scary part isn't that it happened to me. It's that it was so ordinary, a normal Tuesday, a normal morning, crooks digitally posing as grandma while they are the evil wolf in disguise.

As we struggle to type in those long passwords and set up two-factor authentication, I wonder whether the thieves of tomorrow will be baffled by a plain physical lock and key. As they are apparently more comfortable working from home, they are trying to pull strings to gain passwords and account details.

 

The moral of the story is that even though nothing was harmed, it's never too early to start protecting your account, so go sit down and change your passwords. It’s a disgusting and annoying thing, yes. But not fun when you are forced to do it like me.