Thursday, 10 October 2013

Hacked!



I am just recovering from another cyber-attack. This time, it came from someone (might even have been a machine) gaining access to my email account, by which they then persuaded my bank to transfer a significant sum of money to an account in America. Unfortunately, my account manager, who I will call Sam, was out of the office last Friday when the attack was launched. So it was his stand-in who had to deal with his mails and who was duped into processing the request through.

After the weekend, and on reviewing his emails on Monday morning, Sam sussed that something was very wrong. The giveaway for him was the differences between the way the scammer wrote and the way I write. Furthermore the scammer suggested that he would be 'unavailable for the rest of the day because he would be at his office'. Sam knew that unless my circumstances had changed drastically over the weekend, there was no way I could be at any office. So he promptly checked with his Friday stand-in to find out if any money had gone out. Indeed, money had gone from my account.

Now that I have had time to exhale, I am thinking that there could be a connection between my near-death experience (exaggerating here, of course) and the government impasse that has seized America during the last week. While I am not deluded in thinking that my few dollars will help Obama in his stance against the fundamentalist hordes, poor Federal government employees, forced to go on unpaid leave, might be tempted to use alternative means to keep the wolf from the door.

            I hope these poor guys will forgive my slander, but cyber-attacks come from all quarters these days. It was quite a body-blow when we learned this week that Canada has been conducting cyber spying on Brazil, through its shady CSEC that very few of us had heard about. I googled them to see what they are about and found out that the Communications Security Establishment Canada is a very swish organization which even have the brass to advertise openly online for operatives. I didn’t see anything that fitted my skills set, but I applied anyway, since I reckon I qualify on a number of general grounds: no criminal record, a clear conscience resistant to polygraph testing and, so far, an uninteresting credit and financial history. Perhaps I might get lucky. Then, there will be no hiding place for that villain.

I should say though, that apart from the inconvenience of having to go through the hassle of sterilizing my computer and changing passwords, the injury has been relatively slight. The bank fully reimbursed my account. They, in turn, suffered only a minor loss resulting from variations in Canadian-US dollar exchange rates that occurred over that weekend.

And now, finally. Apologies if you received an email, purporting to come from me, inviting you to buy foreclosed real estate.

Tell Fren Tru

6 comments:

  1. Glad you got it sorted. Not nice when it happens though. And thank heavens for a bank manager with some brains!

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    1. Perhaps he will grow to be a writer and tutor others on how to decode who is actually behind the written word!

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  2. I received an email several years ago from a guy who said he was the son of the late Dr. John Karefa-Smart, Sierra Leone's first Foreign Minister and he had several million dollars he wanted to share with me if I could put down a good faith deposit. He didn't know that I was a friend of "the late Doctor" and had spoken to him only a few days before. But the best scams I get are the ones from the "Director of the FBI" telling me he's holding money for me which was confiscated from "unscrupulous money launderers."

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    1. Chances are FBI "directors" still work even when the rest ot the US govt is seized up. So we should for ever be vigilant.

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  3. The serious concern is that this will get worse before it gets better. They are smart out there and getting smarter and more daring. Meanwhile, of necessity, we increasingly abandon safer old fashioned ways of doing business, including operating our accounts, in favour of the electronic methods, in which we take false comfort but are actually exposed to the caprices of these smart fraudsters in ways that we cannot fathom. We are not secured by a password in cyber. The cyber space is now and for a long time to come an open space (for many). God help us.

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  4. Big Brother is watching. His juniour siblings are no less malign. Yes, the cyber world is a pretty scary place. But life is a risky business and we have to take our chances, with all due caution.

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