Sprung At Last

After the hacking, we – meaning my father – get the website up and running again. I ask about checking the log files on the site (I parlez a little technologese), and he says, I’ve got a better idea.

Sometimes, he says, war calls for land mines.

I have no clue what he’s talking about, but I picture myself romping around circuitry like that kid in Home Alone, and that seems like more fun than I’ve been having lately, so count me in.

He explains: Whoever hacked the site will probably be back. When they come back, we’ll be waiting. Or rather, the software will. It’s a two-way connection – they connect to our machines, we connect to theirs.

This isn’t making a lot of sense to me. I don’t want to, say, load a virus on his computer. Who cares? The Departed – if it was him – doesn’t care about anything. It’s not even his machine, he’s probably using his company machine. If it’s him. And if it is him on his company machine, hacking a website run by his ex-wife in order to harass her, I’m willing to wager that his employer would be very interested in knowing that.

Me too, says my father. But it’s much easier and probably more effective if we let our server tell them.

And so I wait.

I belong to a prestigious national women’s organization. You know the kind I mean – hard to get into, slightly snooty reputation.  Well known. When I mentioned to a male coworker one day that I was a member, he got all “Well, la -dee -da! Excuuuuuuse me!” on me. Yes, he’s joking. Mostly.

I try not to lord it over him too much. Mostly.

Anyway, I try to help out with the ladies, and one of the things I helped out with, just last year, was to build a website for our local chapter. It was a big project and took a lot of time; lots of protocol and guidelines were involved, along with aesthetics and technical skills. Everyone was happy with the final site and I got a certificate for my scrapbook and moved on to other things.

Until just two weeks before I was scheduled to go in to arbitration. I got an email from one of the important ladies in Washington DC, letting me know that she was pretty sure our local website had been hacked.

I load the website.

It says HACKED across the main page.

She would seem to have a point.

I try to log in. No luck. My account not only won’t let me in, it seems to have been erased.

I’d like to think I can do this, but the truth is, I can’t. I can do a few technical things but mostly I need a lot of help. The Departed – being an IT guy – used to take care of our computer stuff, and my computer stuff, at least, mostly worked, although The Child’s computer was never functional for longer than a few days at a time for the several years she owned it.

I call Dad. There’s a small miracle and he answers, and goes off to see what’s happened.

While I wait for a return phone call, I mull. Over the past month, I’ve had an old yahoo email account hacked – and also an old, old hotmail account. Both of them – just in the last month. I had read the article about the Wired reporter’s epic hack, and thought to myself, jeez, I should really get more serious about passwords – but it’s just two old email accounts that I haven’t used in years. I closed both accounts when it happened and moved onto other things.

Like, you know, getting quotes for pest control services.

I’ve got time to kill, so I start updating passwords, adding verification layers, and so on. Revoking access. Doing … stuff.

And the thought that keeps nagging at me is: I’ve had a lot of this all at once.

My father calls me back. He’s all calm and reminds me that when I accidentally broke the site earlier in the year, we fixed it quickly and then said, Hey,  people say backing up files is a good idea, let’s try it!

It is a seriously good idea. I love it when we have good ideas. He’s got the whole site on a CD.

I’ll restore it tomorrow, he says. It’s late and I don’t want to do anything dumb since I’m tired. I also want to check the back end. It could just be random, but it seems a bit of an odd target. And it looks … amateurish.

You don’t think?

Yes, he says. That’s exactly what I think. But this sort of thing usually leaves a trail.

I’ll find out.