A few days ago I received a letter from an online business saying their system had been hacked. The hackers took our name, home address, email address, phone number, credit or debit card number, expiration date, and verification code. A bit of a nuisance, but when I checked no one had charged anything fraudulent to our credit card. We may have gotten an extra telemarketer phone call and maybe a few extra email spams, but that seems to be it.
I phoned the credit card company to cancel the card and send out a new one. And I signed up for the two-year credit protection service the hacked business offered us. That was a plus — it had been years since I checked my credit reports, and I had been meaning to do it. Everything looked fine.
I’ll have to change my credit card information for Netflix and a couple of other sites, but on the whole this wasn’t a bit deal. Several years ago my former employer said my personal information, including my birth date and Social Security number, might have been stolen. That was a lot more worrisome, but they offered a two-year credit monitoring service too, and nothing untoward ever happened.
Has anything like this ever happened to you?
March 8, 2014
Has it happened to me? Oh, yes. Not least recently when some hacker got hold of all the people on my email list, only to send them ridiculous offers – in MY name. I was inundated with emails and phone calls from all those dear to me asking me if I was still ticking ok.
BT advised me to change password. They also now log me out every five (well, fifty) minutes. It’s a nuisance.
I don’t understand hackers. What the hell do they get out of it? Though my father, patiently, explained it to me. Still. It stinks. I despise people who ‘hijack’ others’ private stuff. A previous friend of mine, a computer geek if ever there was one, said: “A little bit of friendly hacking doesn’t hurt anyone.” What on earth is ‘friendly’ about hacking? Nearly fell out with him over that one. Did he hack me? I don’t know. And I don’t want to know. I don’t read other people’s diaries so please stay out of my private affairs and my computer. How these people can live with themselves is their secret.
Hope it works out ok for you.
U
I’m not concerned about this incident — it was easy to take care of. But it was a big nuisance in the past when someone messed with my website and I almost got blacklisted. It took me a while to figure out where the site was vulnerable and to fix it, and I signed up for a security program that is supposed to tell me if I’m threatened again.
I’m sorry about someone messing with your email. When I first started I had an email address for my site, but when I started getting spam from it at my other email addresses I closed it. I agree, it’s a horrible feeling to have one’s name used like that.
I do my best to follow the prescribed protocol and monitoring suggested when it comes to protecting financial and personal data. Obviously we aren’t in total control once we use our credit cards at a retail outlet but I monitor all my accounts on-line on a daily basis. So it there is anything suspicious I should catch it almost immediately.
As far as on-line use, something my credit card company does that I really like is make available what they call “virtual credit card numbers”. You go to the credit card site, get a virtual credit card number issued for your planned purchase, then use this issued virtual number to purchase whatever on-line. Once the transaction has completed, say a day or two later, the virtual card number is deleted and is no longer associated with your account. If someone then hacks the retailer and gets that number it is worthless.
I had heard of virtual credit card numbers, but I’ve never tried it. Thanks for the reminder. Mostly we’ve had great luck with our credit cards. I’ve only had one fraudulent charge. I don’t check my account as often as you do, but we do look carefully at our monthly statement. If we don’t recognize a name I do some sleuthing — except for that one time the charges have been legitimate. That time I Googled the name and found that it was a well-known fraud. The thief charged less than $10, so presumably a lot of people wouldn’t even notice something that small. Anyway, I told the credit card company about it and they removed the charge.
We do tell our credit card companies when we plan to travel, to give them a heads up. I figure we’re all in this together.
i worked for the state department of tourism.
upon arriving at work one morning turned on my computer to log into our system.
the same one the public used to see information about our state.
there was a black screen with a huge red devil’s face on it that said something in what appeared similar to arabic. but how could we know. hard to tell really… what language it was. then there were huge letters that said in english F— YOU.
over and over. and KILL ALL.
we started getting calls immediately.
“how dare you put that on the screen?” “does your state think that’s funny!”
good lord. were people stupid enough to think the state really did that ????
our IT people got it off immediately of course.
but it was a very uneasy feeling. like somebody had violated your space. odd and exposed and a little frightening really. considering the violence of the picture and the words. i heard later that it was turned over to OSBI and FBI for investigation.
never heard anything more of course.
What a shock that must have been. And it must have been nice that someone else was in charge of fixing the problem. Great story!
Once for our debit card; twice for the credit card.
On the debit card, Karen noticed some unusual small charges on our bank statement. We were traveling at the time — September 2008, in Illinois, on our first trip with our motorhome. Our bank covered all the bad charges and sent us new cards to our daughter’s home in Wisconsin, if I recall correctly.
Each time on the credit card, we were contacted because of unusual charges. Once they asked us if we had sent any funds to an inmate in a Florida (we’ve only ever known one person in prison – a reprobate nephew that we haven’t seen in 20 years – but he’s in Arkansas, as far as we know). The other time, someone had used our card number to buy a bus ticket in Italy. Again, both times, we were sent new cards and didn’t have to pay the bad charges.
That’s great that the bank covered the fraudulent charges on the debit card. Andy and I thought debit cards might be more vulnerable than that. Good for your credit card companies for catching the unusual activity and being proactive. That inspires trust.
We trust ours, too, but as I recall I heard of one company that noticed a person was charging a lot more than usual and instead of getting suspicious and asking, it simply raised her credit limit. How bad is that?!
Raising the credit limit is crazy… but the banks win if the cardholder can make the payments.
We don’t care about the credit limit. We use our credit card for almost every purchase and pay it off every month. We get quite a bit back every year through the reward points program.
No. But a direct marketer send an sms to Manjiree asking for her name and address and on my advise she responded with Rahul Gandhi’s name and address.
A great reply!
a couple of weeks ago my server sent me a message to say – I was sending them things and to check out my computer…I did, nothing untoward came by. The insinuated if it continued, I would be blacklisted from them…
I e-mailed them to say I had nothing here…and that my licence for xyz company was fully paid up…
I have been with this company for many decades, for some reason they think I would do this…
On the email was information about buying their protection. I was going to download the free thing but my virus checking company didn’t like it – so I didn’t go on with it…
They haven’t even had the courtesy to reply.
oh, another thing, just about every place that wants me to file a password, it has become so complex that I have difficulty finding something “i might remember” – some days when I’m trying to login in somewhere, I get my numbers/characters/upper/lower case thingymegigs muddled up!!
How rude! Especially since you’re a long-term customer. It sounds as if the problem hasn’t come back, thank goodness. We just hope our virus, etc, protection is working the way it should. It’s always a bit worrisome.
Passwords — ugh! I use a simple one on a lot of sites, but for the sites where I want more security I make complicated passwords and write them down. Yes, I know, shouldn’t do that, but I think it’s fairly safe. If my little book ever gets stolen I would contact each company and straighten things out. They have password vaults to keep passwords safe, but I haven’t felt the need for one yet. And it sounds like it might be more trouble to use than what I’m already doing.
I was just ‘hacked” the first week of March. (I am Jean’s brother-in-law.)
I have been ‘spoofed’ several times before, where the hacker sends out
spam, and puts in your e-mail in as the sender, but hasn’t really gotten
into your account. Of course you get the nasty responses from the people
who got the e-mails which alleged came from you, but you didn’t send them.
Apparently there is nothing to do about this except wait them out, unless
you want to send all of your correspondents info that you have a new
e-mail and password, etc, which is a real hassle, so I’ve just waited them
out; they usually go on to some other poor unsuspecting person in a week
or so.
But 10 days ago, they got into my account, somehow got both name and
password, and the account administrators noted the massive amounts of spam
going out, and shut me down. So I had to call and set up a new set of
parameters. That seems to have shut them down, at least for the nonce.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Hackers are a pain. I assume the main thing you had to do was change your password? I haven’t had my account shut down yet. I do hate it when spam goes out under my name and there’s nothing I can do about it.