Two weeks ago my Ebay was hacked. Someone got into the account and changed the email address so my requests for help with a lost password went to them. Then they changed the password. I shouldn’t have been able to get access without administrative help but I had a back door and managed to wrest control back and throw them out. The password was changed and that should have been that.
A little image to bring some color to the page. It has been in my drive for years and I dont know who made it
A few days ago it was hacked again. Once again they had changed the account email address and the password. They could not know about the back door and while it was tempting to throw them out again there some very important questions arising from their ability to crack my passwords in a few days. Either they have invented a quantum computer so they can test all the variations in a few days or they have another access point. They didnt expect me to get back in so quickly I suspect but this time I rang Ebay and told them I had been hacked twice. Their interest was primarily in how I broke back in each time but eventually they went after the hacker. He had left an email address that he could access so he knew when I wanted to get back in. This was interesting. I wasn’t robbed or scammed. I was just annoyed. On purpose! Unless he is busily selling access to all the sites he hacks to Georgian mafia or something.
Ebay was certain someone had hacked my email account and was busily building a set of data that would allow them to hit me all over the place. They thought the attackers had a redirect somewhere in the system that told when I had mail. When I told the Ebay site that I needed password assistance they got it as well and it allowed them to reset the password.
After reporting the breach Ebay was frozen to me, my back door firmly closed.
When I realized the Ebay account had been hacked I was on my way to try a little painting. I was feeling very ill and sore but there was a lull in the physical dramas here and the muse was calling with all her diaphanous creativity and it felt incredible to be connected up again. The shuffle back and forth between the computer and the phone drained every last kilo joule of strength and I ended up shamelessly slumped over the desk to get to the keyboard. It was a slow, relentless, battle to keep my mind clear enough to understand what needed to be done and to record every new password and the connections in the big notebook. The moment Ebay gave me something that didnt need to be attended to I crawled into bed and fought waves of cramps and burning nerve endings until I could sleep. I hate sleeping. It means terrible nightmares and then the pain that flows from my body when the pain relief wears off. It unmans me and lately has been so severe I have woken sobbing and sat for several hours with my chin on my chest unable to stand. With the need to secure the apartment and stand up to physical attacks here the pain has had to be thrown off like some kind of hellish blanket. I have done it but this is the result.
I am back to that level of exhaustion again so I will rest and eat crackers in bed. Comfort food helps with low level pain and depression or despair. Interested to see if I can get through this entry. It has been better than expected. I will be back
From the internet. He seems the appropriate image for here
Here we are again. its hard to breathe. When the wind blows it drives the dust out but the air outside is still. The chemicals and dust hang about and hit my lungs. Im wearing surgical masks at night to try and lessen the damage. It is as serious as the heart disease and between them I feel my life teeters. I want to ask the legion of attackers for mercy but when I tried that before they were encouraged to try harder! Am I a whinger? Maybe, but the pain is the background for my life and it comes in so many forms that dont let up for a moment. If my life was filled with tumbling kittens that is what would be on every page among the stories!
The story is a bit upside down. The attacks on the Ebay account were discovered after some other things had occurred that may change their context.
The computer seemed to open up properly the morning before the Ebay attack was discovered but there was a red warning flag on the tray at the bottom of the screen. The network was gone. There was no sign of a single wireless connection anywhere according to the Windows Internet Network and Sharing Center. Normally the machine would show a list of them with the one I use at the top. Something like that points to the most likely sites for failure.
It wasnt the modem because that would have left the computer with the wireless signals. It wasn’t the fiber. We have fiber here. It had to be the wireless adapter. This computer has been rebuilt about five times. In the day it appeared people didnt build in wireless or bluetooth connectors. When I moved here the connection was through a wireless broadband dongle and they hadn’t had to supply that service in this area so the speeds were as low as almost zero at times. The ISP put pressure on me to change to ADSL and when I did they supplied a wireless router. Im tired and filling the page with pointless jabber here. Anyway the computer was given a D-Link PCI adapter which, although only slow, has plugged on without a stammer or breakdown. That was where the disconnect had to be. Either in the software or the actual card. Nothing had happened to make the card collapse so it was pulled out and its teeth cleaned as well as the socket. With the connection down it couldn’t repair the software so the drivers had to be rebuilt from old versions on the supplied DVD.
Four hours was spent ringing around trying to find another adapter card and universally they all tried to sell me something else and said they always had one in stock but not today. One of the home-visiting geeks offered to send me a technician for $60 same day fee plus normal fee and he didnt know if he had one in the car but as they are down to costing under forty bucks he wouldn’t be offering me that without something else that he would say was broken. They do that here. It is a real shark pond where far too many small repairers look after too few people with the money to use their services.
Reloading the software and cleaning the connections worked so we were online. Techbuy is sending the faster version of a wireless adapter which cost all of twenty dollars online. Its not as fast as what yours will be if you bought it with the built-in wireless but I wont notice. What normally happens after anything untoward is that I run all the virus and malware programs I can lay my hands on. I normally run anti-viruses a couple of times a week anyway but viruses can get in so quickly. I ran Search and Destroy first and despite the regular cleaning there were keyloggers and Trojan horses peppered all through the drive. Quite a few of them. My live anti-virus should have caught them. The firewall had been a worry for a while. Online Armor had been dropped by Emsi Soft some time back but it had protected me up to that point. I paid for a top line firewall and downloaded it. Whatever is happening is at a serious level and I have to get more serious about protecting myself, on a pension, while I am often too ill to do the tasks. Several more anti-malware programs were run and showed nothing so I prepared to go back to being a normal user. That was when I went to have a look in Ebay!
So now we have caught up a little. I was exhausted as normal and slept until next day before going back into the fog and contacting the email providers. I have been with them for more than a decade and as I have gone from technology to technology they have built a little rabbit warren of accounts that I cannot access without a guiding technician. The last thing they did before we settled down to the NBN account was to dump the email address I have had for almost fifteen years for a random thing they generated to celebrate my crossing the rubicon to full fiber. Getting the old address back meant some other account name and webmail account had to exist. By the time we get to dealing with this I am always too ill to understand what they have done and it was no different this time. I plugged on till lunch time while getting locked out of this and that for trying too many times to access the management section without understanding which user went with which password and which email address. Im not sure what was achieved but I needed several days to recover from moving the furniture when the water heater exploded. It has been without a break since then. My heart is beating in my ears and Im hallucinating. I keep making mistakes and finally fold back to bed.
After spending the night climbing in and out of bed replying to cramps and nightmares and stress that wouldn’t even let me close my eyes for hours the next morning was spent riding the mobility scooter to the store and doing the grocery shopping. The pharmacy worker tells me she thinks of me as “adventure man” because of the way I dress. She doesn’t know about my life at all and the reason for the reference escapes me. I cant even tell if it is insulting or not. I tell her I used to go on adventures.
The contractors have been finding reasons to work on the neighboring apartments so they can look at the cameras and sign. Cars glide past all day. It is barely a trickle but we dont get many down here at the bottom of the driveway. People suddenly find a need to walk their dogs to the bottom of the driveway. A few going around the back of the apartment to look at that camera may be more sinister. The neighbor with the porch seems to have stopped heckling although his offsider “pain in the ass #2” has been seen passing on his mobility scooter and loudly whispering “we are gonna move you out, you c**t!”
Usually, after a trip out, I spend several hours fighting the cramps and pain before heading off to sleep. The sleep is unavoidable and walking about in a pair of orthopedic shoes I designed myself really causes some pain so time after shopping is a bit nasty. Yesterday I thought I had better look into the websites I have online and when I did at least two of them had been hacked as well or at least as I remember it one has Hindi advertising on it and all the internal links are shut down while the other other is just a cover page with a 404 (page not found) at the end of the links.
It should just be a matter of reloading the site with a few new bits of code. They are all backed up. The provider of my web services is a lot like the provider of the email accounts. When I first went online and was teaching myself to make websites I found a little Australian company and they worked me through the set up of what would become extensive sites. Both they and the makers of the Antenna software were happy to help back when things were less intense. The domain hosting company sold to another company who immediately charged more and lowered the number of services and sub-domains I could have. They changed the servers and the addresses and a whole bunch of things before selling to another company who kept some of my stuff on the old servers but not all. They changed access to the control panel, server addresses, account types and what could be had on an account while using all sorts of new names to describe what they have done or what I have done. When I am this tired I just dont have a clue but the website back-ups I need to upload were last pulled out of mothballs several changes back and the passwords and connections they were tied to have changed. I dont have a clue how to get to the ones in use now so I sent a garbled email to the providers. They send an email back politely asking what I am talking about. I am too tired so I dont want to do any more. They will judge the issue closed if I dont answer soon but there simply isnt enough gas in my tank to deal with the mental acrobatics and learning curve I need to even have the conversations. And that is about where we are up to with lots left out.