sally_point_zero | Dec. 28th, 2014

I was reminded, by something trivial, of getting hacked a few years ago. I call it 'hacked' but it's difficult to label. I got targeted anyhow, that can definitely be said. Whatever cowardly scumbag did it, they were capable of controlling my computer both onllne and off, locking me out of all my online accounts as well as my files and folders in the hard drive. It got much much nastier than that ...eg I'd get notifications of accounts opened in my name (which is a very rare/unique name) that of course I could not access. They were in sites like 'Daily Motion' and 'Local Slags'. My late father's name appeared on a new folder on my desktop, that of course I could not open. It said it contained 44 items. An image of a seal pup's face looking out of a skin cancer appeared...

I really don't want to talk about all the sheer nastiness of it but it got pretty bad. I couldn't prevent stuff being uploaded to my mac. One day over 2000 hateful image files swamped the machine as soon as I switched it on, accompanied by a gut-churning death-metal noise I couldn't stop .... had to disconnect the mac speakers (that was my old, beloved iMac - it ended up getting trashed). BUT I had a health visitor in my flat at the time and he was there to actually witness it - yay!! He just didn't know what to make of it tho.

Of course I tried reporting all this to the police several times, but it did no good. They said I'd got a computer virus and it was not their concern.

In the end I had to go to hospital, suffering from nervous exhaustion. I was a patient for three weeks. When I got home things got even worse and I stopped switching the mac on or going online in cyber caffs. I felt totally cut off.

I'm on my third mac now and it's the latest Apple Intel. Everything seems to be fine - the nasty stuff just went away eventually and suddenly I found I could access LJ and Facebook again. I've never regained access to MySpace and a few other accounts but they don't much matter. My name does not appear linked to sites all over Google Search anymore. NB my iPhone was a joke - it was hacked worse than the mac. I dialled 999 in desperation one evening and got the message 'Call back later'. After that it would not phone out at all.

Nowadays my phones are perfectly OK and I've stopped dreading using a mobile. I did get a new iPhone 5s eventually but I sold it back to E-Bay for pennies this November - I just couldn't trust it. That is the last casualty!

I really haven't spoken to anybody about all this - it sounds so totally implausible and I suppose I preferred not to as things gradually got better. I get black panic sometimes that I don't know what may really appear online -- there were a lot of sickening indications that my text and images were being tampered with after I hit 'Send'. A horrible helpless state of mind! But suddenly last night I found it's easy to type stuff sitting on your own in a room!

ANYWAY ... the best thing is that I'm now a member of Core Arts here in East London and I've been improving my oil painting thru portraits and life painting and generally getting right back into art again. AND I've made a lot of good friends there who are fellow artists.

SALLY POINT ZERO