Over the past few months, I’ve been reading more and more about internet security, or the lack there of. Specifically, on the airplane flying home for Christmas, I was unsettled by an article on hacking I read in Wired magazine. And so I though, “You know, my accounts are rather connected, and I save so many emails that there has to be data in there someone could use to get into other accounts. I really need to go change some passwords, delete old emails, and maybe make myself a new email account.”
But I didn’t get around to it until Monday, when I woke up to find that my yahoo mail had been accessed from Italy, and had sent all of my contacts a suspicious link.
Luckily, this is not the email account I use for most of my communicating. I changed the password and updated security as best I could on every account that shared any information with that email. I opened the new gmail account I’d been considering adopting for awhile. I checked all of the other sites that I useregularly for signs of tampering.
I found a second account had also been accessed, and though no real damage seemed to have been done it was chilling. I had hoped that when the hacker had sent out spam without making any attempt to lock me out of my email account, it was because that spam was the extent of their goals. After all, I might not have noticed the suspicious account activity if it hadn’t been paired with emails I hadn’t sent. But this was a sign that more than just my email had been compromised.
So now I’m doing my best to be vigilant. I’m lucky that I didn’t lose anything, that my accounts were temporarily hijacked instead of being completely taken over, and that at least some of their actions were easily noticeable and set off alerts. But that doesn’t change the fact that I feel to some extent like my home has been invaded.
I can’t move off of the internet. Can’t close down my email and my website and all of my various accounts and live a life of information security. The life I’m building for myself requires I be here. It demands my participation in social media, my availability by email and skype, my ability to engage and connect online. Society is demanding more and more of that from all of us these days.
So please, all of you, be as safe and as smart as you can online. There is no such thing as complete security when so much information is interconnected and protected by paltry combinations of letters, numbers and symbols, but we can be more careful about what we save and how interconnected our accounts are.
Check the blog later this week to see to me talk about comics, books and movies I’ve been reading and watching lately.