How I tried to stop a Hacker

So last night my wife received a phone call the other evening while she was doing house work. It was a friend from years back that she had not talked to in 4 years. We had a surprise coming. The friend said she was IM’ing with my wife on Face book as they were talking on the phone.

Was kind of taken back a little bit and she stated that she had not been on the computer. She asked me to go look at what was going on. This friend indicated that someone was asking for money and that she was in trouble. This person was impersonating my wife.

Then the phone really started ringing at this point. there was more then one person that was talking with this impersonator. and many had been asked to send money because she was in another country and in trouble.

I immediately changed the password and deleted the Face Book account. now the reason I did both is because if the person was actively using face book and logged in it is possible that they could change the password and her information used to change the password. You know the secret question!!! By changing the password and immediately shutting it down. The attacker can not reactivate the account.

With Face book you can re-activate your account with the username and the password. so if the attacker knew the password and username he could simply re-activate the account by logging back in. But since i changed the password before deactivation he is stuck.

So then she said we should check her Hotmail account. That was the start of a long night. we changed the password and logged out. And went to log back in and BAM he had changed the password, and the “SECRET QUESTION” had been changed. UGH he had us we were locked out of our own Email. (for some reason her phone has stayed connected so we have been watching the email fly).

On to EBAY we immediately jumped on to EBAY and sure enough he was THERE we started trying to change the password and delete all the payment information. And BAM he had changed the password and that infamous Secret Question. As well as the phone number you can use to have them call you to reset the account. UGH this guy was moving fast.

We contacted EBay immediately And they started helping us. we finally gained control of the account. when I logged in i found all the information this guy had put in place including part of the cell phone number. And an address that is invalid in Washington DC. The Cell number was a 202 area code and ended in 21 but not sure of the number in between. I thought I saw the full number while I was changing the info so I tried calling it. But it went to a generic voice mail.

So now that I have control of EBAY I start moving to take control of her hotmail account. And low and behold I found out why I do not like free accounts. there is no one to call or to ask to have the account disabled if you do not have access to the account. if it has been Hijacked and you can not make the changes your self you are kind of stuck. there is a form you can fill out but then you have to wait several hours. or it can be even longer in some cases. And the form  is extremely long and you need to provide as much detailed information as you can to try to help prove the account is yours.

During this time the person is still using the account requesting money from your contacts and just being a general pain. he is perusing our email and deleting all he wants to copying every thing he wants to keep that they may find as valuable.

It sure makes you feel violated to see it all happen and know they have access to your personal information. All in all it was a huge lesson Luckily we have been able to at least keep up with him and change many things before he actually was able to accomplish any real financial damage. AS of right now we seem safe but we will not really know for several months or years. We have had to put a watch on all of our credit and accounts for fraudulent activity as well as begin an in-depth review of our credit report.

we are lucky we caught it as it was happening but it happens fast. And finding what you need to do can be a real challenge.