Hacked Off

My Facebook profile was recently hacked.

The hacker was very ingenious. Worming into the Instant Messaging program, he or she sent bogus IM's under my profile with links to two or three salacious websites that offered messages like, "Hey, you looked real cute in these pictures".  

 However, even while chatting I never saw them going out. Had I, I would've stopped talking- and maybe even looked, to see what I was missing-but then certainly would’ve quickly logged off to discontinue whatever filth my friend was “receiving” from me. But these surprises were invisible from my end. I didn't even have to be on-line. Automated, these "messages" kept periodically popping up to random people in my contact list, whether I was in Facebook or not.

As usual though, I was clueless at first.

Earlier I'd been having a delightfully innocuous little IM chat with a friend who suddenly cut off the dialog with no further explanation. I thought it was odd because we're pretty tight and can tell each other just about anything. Momentarily troubled, I chalked it up to my IM friend needing to get back to work or something, and went about my business myself.

Until awhile later when another friend wrote on my Facebook wall that he too had received some questionable messages from me. Yikes. We’re good friends, but not that good. At the time, I wasn’t even chatting with him. But after assuring me he wasn’t ‘looking for a relationship’, said this had happened to someone else and suggested that I, too, might have been hacked.

And it was only then that the refrigerator door in my head finally opened and the light in my little pee brain came on. Duh! As we were chatting, my gal-pal friend likely got the same raunchy links. No wonder she did the electronic version of hanging up on me. I hadn’t checked ‘em out, but apparently those pictured, were quite naked and doing things to themselves and others that, I was told, would make a Merchant Marine blush. 

Of course, anyone who's ever been on the Internet for more than ten minutes knows the garbage that got spliced into my profile had very little redeeming value. Of course, often, neither do I. But this stuff was really disgusting. And though I hadn't consciously done anything wrong, I still felt terribly dirty and ashamed. I felt about the same as if someone had broken into my house and taken a dump in the living room.

And I guess that was the point.

They don't hack 'ya cuz for world peace and global enlightenment; they don’t hack ya because they like ya either. They hack 'ya because they can. It’s how certain members of society- namely computer savvy anti-social friendless low-life vermin sitting in a dark room with a mouse and a keyboard- choose to interact with their fellow man. To them, it's like high tech masturbation. Corrupting somebody else's on-line life feels real good.

Nevertheless, filth had been sent out to unsuspecting friends under my name. I knew most of the guys in my contacts would either ignore these messages or figure they were counterfeit. But half my FB friends are of the fairer gender; and whether they came to that same conclusion or not, I couldn't help but wonder if a few of them had misgivings- briefly or not- about ever friending me in the first place. And at least one had.

I had to spend several minutes with the non-virtual mother of two boys, who's known me from church for over a decade, trying to prove who I really was and how I really knew her. I didn't blame her though. These days you can never be too safe. Still, when I finally convinced her we were okay and things were back to normal, I felt like I needed a shower. Defending yourself against a false witness is hard work. It just about wore me out.

I'm of a mature age now (though that term seldom is an accurate description of me), but even in my wilder days I'd never been a party to sharing smut with a girl. I certainly wouldn't take part in it now. It wouldn't speak well of me as a man; it wouldn’t speak well of me as a boy, although I guess a lot of boys masquerading as grown-ups do this for sport now; like the gutless Bill Gates wanna-be hiding in the shadows of cyberspace who’d linked my name with two or three disgusting e-links and sent them out under my name. As unseemly as it was, there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.

It wasn't fair and I felt under attack. But it wasn't personal. An anonymous computer nerd had gotten his jollies and taken some perverse delight by hacking into Facebook and messing up hundreds, maybe thousands of stranger's accounts; not just mine. Nothing was taken from me, though, except a little pride. I didn't lose my identity or any money, and after changing my password and security settings the immediate problem was taken care of. No big deal.

Yet all weekend long it still bugged me. It's hard enough to live in the real world with a sense of integrity and honor. So when my Facebook profile got hacked, I felt let down. And like I'd let others down, too. When whoever it was hacked my account, in a way they'd kind of hacked my reputation, too. 

But perhaps all is not lost. Maybe in the end, it all evens out. Maybe- and let’s hope-  there's a special hackers place in hell where all the software is corrupt and the Help Desk guy is still working from an IBM PC 286.

Or maybe I should just stay off Social Media…