When Your Friend Gets Hacked

hacking

Note: if someone sent you this link, and you want to just skip to the fun part of the post, click here. But please come back for the meat…

“Help, I’ve been mugged in the United Kingdom!”

If you do see this pop up in a Facebook chat, don’t freak out.

It means your friend has been hacked. It usually starts with their email address being compromised, and the identity thief uses that to take over other online accounts.

Here’s what you need to know to help your friend (and here’s why you don’t want to try to hack my friends.)

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The Accidental Tourist

Usually, I have a good idea why people come to this site.

I use the free Sitemeter tool to track hits, and as I generally have low traffic and no ads, that’s decent enough for me.

Sitemeter tracks the last 100 visitors, and let’s me know (among other things) the page they hit, how long they stayed, what site they were on when they clicked over, what operating system, which city — a treasure trove of information.

(For instance, a lot of my traffic comes from search engines, so I can tell when people are looking for “Chocolate Covered Cockroaches” and coming to my site.)

In the last week or so, I have seen a lot of traffic from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. And in the last couple of days, a similar spike from Tema, Ghana.

A couple of years ago, the spike in Saudi traffic was almost entirely centered on my “Live Nude Girls” post, but in this current wave I have no clue. The Riyadh and Tema visits are clean, no trace of the info.

It’s quite possible those are just compromised proxies, and I am being auto-scanned for vulnerabilities by overseas hackers. And, with that in mind, time to boost my security settings…

That’s why it pays to pay attention to these sorts of things.