Hacked - Al Martine

I don’t feel violated.

I don’t even feel irritated.

I do feel confused, because I can’t figure out how it happened. Yesterday morning, during a call with someone from my company I noticed my Facebook status changed to HI. I thought this was just a typo on my part, while trying to search.

However, when my Gmail account showed 134 unread messages (up from 15 a few moments before) something didn’t seem right. A little investigation showed that both my Twitter Account and Gmail account had been hacked. Just as globalization helps in good times and hurts in bad times because all the economies of the world are interlinked, the same can be said about interlinking online accounts.

See, when the Twitter account was hacked it updated my Facebook account. In fact, posting this to my blog will update a number of locations including Facebook, LinkedIn and a few others that I’ve forgotten. The opportunity to disseminate a virus or hack becomes exponential this way.

Yesterday, the interlinking wasn’t too bad, but depending on the virus and scam, things could get pretty tricky.

But, back to the story. My investigation of the hack showed that my personal computer or network was never breached (virus scan OK, Outlook address book was left alone). The hack only occurred online with the Google Contacts and Twitter. I don’t update Twitter via email so there’s no link there.

So, this has led me to believe that either Firefox’s passwords were breached (thus disproving my theory my home system was okay but work locks down the PC pretty thoroughly), or my Blackberry was hacked during my trip the to NYC the day before.

The Blackberry is my current theory because I noticed that Gmail had a login from the same IP address used by the Blackberry around the time of the hack’s execution. Was it Bluetooth or the WIFI? I don’t know since the handheld is set to un-discoverable (Bluetooth) and I never turned the WIFI part on since it has a nasty habit of dropping calls.

Please drop me a comment if you’ve experienced this hack before or know something about it. My guess is that it’s pretty new since there’s nothing on the net documenting it.

Here’s the email hack (in image format to avoid helping the jerks out):

Any ideas or information would be helpful.

Thanks.