Commentary: I’ve been hacked…again.
Me and 150 million of my fellow calorie counting-OCD friends were notified that the app we use was hacked and our data might have compromised. Fortunately, little personally sensitive data is housed on that website, but now some Bulgarian hacker knows my body-mass index and is laughing his Bulgarian butt off about overweight Americans.
I realize that learning my snacking habits are not the ultimate hacking prize. They are testing software and network vulnerabilities so that they can eventually hack into the Pentagon or my neighbor’s Internet-enabled toaster and remotely turn it from light brown to burnt charcoal.
Soon, some Russian hacker will hack into my Fitbit and know I didn’t get my steps in yesterday. I will, however, write to him and protest that Fitbit doesn’t count time on exercise bikes as steps. I would hope the company is working on this, but I want both the company and my hacker to know that I’m pretty fastidious about getting my exercise daily.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been hacked. A few years back, I and 3 billion of my closest friends had our yahoo.com email accounts hacked.
Among the gems that these hackers got their hands on were some off-color jokes, notes to friends about upcoming travel and wayyyyy toooooo many diatribes about how terrible the Kansas City Royals bullpen is. In fairness to both the North Korean hackers and the Kansas City Royals, I do write about things other than how abysmal Royals middle relief pitching is, but not many.
I try to follow the security protocols suggested by experts, such as changing your password every 17 minutes, never reusing a password, and including in the password eight letters, a number, a special keyboard character, one of the 7 Dwarves, a European capital city, your mother’s maiden name, the name of your first-grade teacher’s best friend’s pet schnauzer and a strand of DNA from the left side of your 17th chromosome. As a result, most people’s passwords are either password, password1 or 12345.
At least I can take solace that my Facebook data is safe. I mean, they are a gigantic multi-kajillion dollar company who would always have my best interests at heart, right?
I think the next online presence of mine to be hacked will be my amazon.com account. We all get thousands of emails from them with purchase suggestions. Given their global reach and all-seeing algorithms, I wonder if the hackers are getting emails like “You hacked Phil Wilke. Amazon has new recommendations for you based on your hacking history. You may also like hacking his daughters, his cousins, his coworkers and that one guy from high school he sorta knew and now wants to be best friends.”
There is, of course, a serious, risky and financially ruinous side to all this malicious hacking. Remember last year when the credit rating agency Equifax was hacked and financial data of 143 million Americans was compromised? It’s much more than an annoyance to track whether your bank account was emptied or items are being purchased with your stolen credit cards. At least Equifax tried to make up for its epic fail by charging the victims of the theft for credit recovery services…until they were publicly shamed into providing the service for free.
I have been duped into one massive breach of personal privacy. Last year – on my birthday – I received an email that looked like it came from a legitimate package delivery company saying that they tried to make a delivery at my home, and I need to click the link provided to reschedule delivery. It being my birthday and me loving presents, I eagerly clicked. As when nothing happened, over and over again, I called the customer service phone number of the legitimate package delivery service who informed me that was a scam and I should probably never use the Internet again.
All this hacking has lead me to a stunning personal revelation: I need to start living a much more interesting life so that when I am hacked in the future my personal information is more exciting.
Phil Wilke is a recent transplant to Las Cruces, fears for his digital privacy and is a freelance writer. He can be reached at wilkephil@yahoo.com.