Social Stories of indiviuals

Aleesia

My email was hacked years ago. The hacker had been accessing my account for weeks before I found out. The hacker corresponded with a couple of my former male acquaintances and forwarded them nude pictures I had sent to a man I was dating. Neither of the former acquaintances said a word. In fact, they conversed with the hacker back and forth without my noticing it. The hacker was deleting the emails from the inbox and I rarely checked the sent folder. One weekend morning, a friend called me to say he was getting strange messages from my email address. He said my account had been compromised that morning. Someone had sent out a mass email from my account with pictures, personal correspondences, and my password with an invitation to everyone to access my account. When I opened my email, I discovered that the person had forwarded the information to not only friends but also family, including my aunt. I was devastated. Since then, I am leery about using email, and I’m done using it for personal business. Even though I do use two-step verification, I keep my email limited to professional messages and the occasional message to friends or family to give me a call. I eventually learned the identity of the hacker: A male friend’s girlfriend had her friend hack my email because she mistakenly thought we were more than friends.

Michael

Have I ever been hacked? Sure, lots of times. I had my identity stolen several times when I lived in California, even before the internet was a thing. One of those thieves opened credit accounts and went bankrupt, which made for a real mess when I tried to get my first credit card. About once a year, I have to close a credit account because of fraud. Usually, I am notified by the issuing card company of suspicious activity. My father lost his life savings in several accounts when thieves stole his debit card and checks. One of my email accounts has been hacked. My Facebook page has been hacked. So yeah, I’ve had experience with this.

Jane

Who hasn’t been hacked? I’ve had my checking account compromised in a major way six times in eight years and many smaller breaches, but I’ll just tell you about nos. 2 and 3.Someone bought $6,000 of furniture in Italy (we are in NJ) so that brought us down to $0.00 on the first of the month. Naturally we were at the bank within minutes and everything was fixed to our absolute satisfaction. This was on a Sunday. Then on Tuesday our account was drained again, with our new debit card numbers. Within two days, how could this happen? Somewhat hysterical, I was allowed to reach the Fraud Investigation Department of our national bank. He told me they had 250 employees who investigated fraud. This was almost a decade ago. Wow, he had no idea yet how the first event happened but was quite sure the second one came from a hidden camera at an ATM machine which at that time was a fairly new method, at least to me. Here’s the scoop now: I check my account online almost every day. I don’t know if that sets me up for vandalism or not, but I have caught untoward things before they roll out of control—recently a small charge for something on my card but using my husband’s name. This is apparently a practice to see if the account is valid before they do the big hit. I am resigned that this is going to keep happening despite all efforts by the banks. It is a new world and realize that and watch your bank account daily.

Chris

I am a midshipman at the United States Naval Academy, and I along with many of my shipmates were a part of the OPM breach. However, my story is about a different, more common hack: getting your credit or debit card information stolen. This happened at around the same time as the OPM breach, so it may or may not be related. As part of the training at the Naval Academy, midshipmen after their first year are sent a ship in the fleet to shadow an enlisted sailor for a month. I was lucky to be sent to USS Rushmore while she was on deployment in the Persian Gulf. It was a great experience where I was able to see the terrific people that we have in our Navy. I kept in touch with my family through Facebook messages over the ship’s extremely slow satellite internet connection. One day, about two weeks in, I got a message from my family that my bank, Navy Federal Credit Union, had contacted them about fraudulent charges. Here I was in the middle of the Persian Gulf, with very little connection to the outside world, and someone was running wild with my money back stateside. I contacted the officer in charge of us midshipmen on the ship, and she was able to allow me to use the ship’s satellite phone to call Navy Federal and sort this out. We went through the recent charges and I identified which were fraudulent. Interestingly enough for the worker on the other end of the call, the fraudulent charges were from convenience stores in Pennsylvania, not from the Amsterdam airport or Bahrain. Navy Federal has a very good policy for this sort of thing, and I was not liable for the charges at all. As midshipmen, we do not get paid very much. However, my card had to be canceled, so now I had no access to money on the other side of the world. I had no money for liberty in Dubai and no money during my travel back stateside. In our mandatory cybersecurity classes at the Academy, we would call this result an attack on the cybersecurity pillar of Availability. I was lucky to have good midshipmen friends who helped me out during this crisis, and I eventually payed them back. However, theft of credit card information is extremely common. These days, it is not really a question of if, but when. A young enlisted sailor who is in a more precarious situation than I am could be put in a pretty bad place. That sailor might not regularly contact someone back home, and may return from deployment nine months later to see this problem become way out of hand. Our servicemembers are particularly vulnerable to this kind of thing, especially when they are on deployment, but it is extremely difficult to prevent this sort of hack. The best defense is probably early alert procedures and a generous policy for resolving fraudulent charges on service member’s accounts after the fact.