The Final Piece Of The Social Media, umm Facebook Puzzle For Me, HACKED!

I have spoken to some here in the past about getting hacked on Facebook. It’s a reality folks and it happens every day. I am willing to bet that it has happened to some reading this post. It Happens and if you are aware of your surroundings, take your account personally, be ever savvy of connections to those you don’t personally know.

Last year I was hacked by a pro and really messed up everything I was about on the net. I made a very big mistake by connecting or linking my Yahoo, Google, Twitter and some other accounts all through my Facebook account. Let me explain to you the extent of the damage caused.

Facebook: 10 Pages, 5 groups and over 1700 friends.

Yahoo: 10,624 Email addresses that have been accumulated over many years, 8 Yahoo Groups as administrator and belonging to 200 more.

Google: Gmail account, over 3,000 connections, Picasso, Blogger, 4 blogs, Google Documents, over 400.

Twitter: over 2000 connections, hundreds of posts per hour until the account was shut down

This is what was affected by this pro hacker. He took control of my Facebook account and consequently took control of my internet life. The first thing he did was lock me out by changing my passwords in all that was connected to Facebook. After that he contacted me demanding money to give me back control of my life. Mocking me he said he owns me and for a period of time he did. My world was changed as of that day and I was devastated.

My first reaction was to shut off my accounts. I immediately went into my pay accounts and make sure they weren’t compromised. I at least was safe there. After that I went into each account and made contact with each respective company and reported that I was hacked and had all accounts shut down. This was done by filling out questions to prove who I was. If you ever wonder why you are asked special security questions when creating an account, this is why. I spent the day getting control of all accounts that were affected. By the time I was able to get back into my accounts and assess the damage I was completely destroyed as far as business went.

If I was to go into everything that was done to me it would be a year long article. I could write a book with all the changes that were made so I will give you just a quick summery of what I was faced with.

1.      All links connected with all accounts were changed to malware, namely a keystroker.

2.      All accounts identities were changed to a new name and loaded with keystroker links.

3.      All email accounts were hijacked and all my address books were spammed over and over again.

4.      All my blogs with Blogger were changed and all links were converted to keystrokers and porn sites.

5.      My Facebook username was changed.

Number 5 was the worse thing of all and the hardest to fix. As you know if you have a Facebook account, once you set your Facebook user name you can’t change it. I have spent the last year fixing the issues that were caused by this hacker and doing damage control and the last piece of the puzzle was getting my identity back.

Now this has proved to be one of the hardest things to do. For a year I had to live with this hacker’s user name and not able to do anything about it. After reading a blog post the other day about Facebook user names and intellectual property I had a revelation. Facebook has a form that helps you if your username has been stolen by someone else and you can give good reason as to why it should belong to you. I came up with the idea that what if I fill out the form and tell them that the reverse has happened. I was given a username that I never wanted. I filled out the form and 24 hours later Facebook removed the username and allowed me to reset it. Finally after a year I was able to achieve triumph. I no longer have to share my life with my hacker friend.

Look, the reason I wrote this article is in part to celebrate my freedom but also to help make you aware of what can happen if you don’t take things seriously. The next time you feel that the security precautions put in place on the internet are frivolous then you better stop in your tracks and remember what you read here. This is my real life experience and if only I didn’t over look the obvious I wouldn’t have ever had to deal with that.