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China Elevator Stories
Repeated Security Breaches by a hacker: My Experience with Multiple Hacks
I have experienced repeated security breaches.
03/06/2024
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
I am experiencing being hacked almost daily.
The first time I realized a man had hacked into my computer was when a second mouse appeared on my screen while I was editing pictures.
Only a few days before this happened, he had asked me to download a program that would allow me to search for spyware on my computer, which was not software to protect my computer, but spyware disguised as anti-spyware software that would allow him to hack into my computer instead.
He would stop me from editing pictures, watch everything I did on my screen live on his screen, freeze my screen while I was working on my computer so I could not finish projects, hack into my blog, change titles, change photos, …
Once I realized this, I deinstalled the software, but it turned out that deinstalling it made no difference. Ever heard of a program that would not let you deinstall it once installed? I haven’t, but I do believe that this is what happened. Or, another scenario could have been that he installed another program from afar before I deinstalled the software so he could still be in my computer.
In my experience, the problem with spyware that has been installed by another person is commonly that it is invisible and is therefore hard to detect or cannot be detected at all.
When I logged into my blog, one day I found my profile picture had been repeatedly uploaded. A hacker had also changed my picture on quite a few of my pages. I tried to change them all back to one single profile picture but found that this was taking up way too much time, in particular because he simply uploaded new pictures and changed them whenever I was working on changing them back.
I eventually gave up and left it at that.
Another time I encountered a problem with hacking was when I was looking for a job. During that time, I used my personal website as an online portfolio I could send with my job applications.
Right before I had a job interview one time, my website, as well as my blog had gone completely empty. They had both been hacked into and somebody had installed a virus on both pages. I could resolve the issue with the help of my hosting provider for my blog, but I wasn’t able to fix the issue on my personal website.
My provider told me that they were not familiar with this issue and did not know how to fix it and that this was the first time they had encountered this specific problem.
Another occurrence where I realized someone had changed private information was when I went to a pharmacy to get prescription iron supplements. Even though my income was low enough so that I would not have had to pay a prescription fee, when I asked the employee for the supplements, their system showed that I had to pay a fee.
Upon encountering this problem, I contacted my health insurance company, because this is where pharmacies get their information from. But when I called them, they said their system showed that I didn’t have to pay a prescription fee. They issued me a letter that stated this so I could show this information to the pharmacy.
When I went back to the pharmacy, the pharmacy’s system still showed that I had to pay a fee. Even though I had a letter that showed that I did not have to pay a prescription fee, I could not solve this problem with the pharmacy (the information can only be changed through the health insurance company, which told me it had the correct information – the pharmacy’s system, on the other hand, displayed the wrong information). The problem could only get resolved once the hacker hacked into whichever place he had hacked into to change my information back to the original data.
Because all of the data was in German, I believe it was not my ex-husband who hacked into their system. I also do not know that my ex-husband would have such advanced hacking skills, but I do know that this particular person has advanced hacking skills.
He has also been hacking into other people’s accounts, and I have received weird emails from these accounts, such as the email (excerpt) shown in the picture above.
After my email accounts had been hacked various times, I chose one company to transfer all my emails to two new email accounts. I signed up to receive their newsletters, and voilà, this is an email I recently received.
As far as I can discern, the email in the picture above was written up by this particular stalker and is not from this company – it looks professional enough, which can make it hard to discern from an email written up by an employee of this company.
I have had this happen not only once, but various times by now so I am aware that this can happen!
I also believe that this has to happen repeatedly until a person may be able to grasp what is actually going on.
Let’s say this only happened two times, and I was not aware that I was being stalked and hacked – I probably wouldn’t know it could be a stalker. But let’s say this happens all of the time and the other person has given me enough clues – I would then have enough experience to know that this may actually be a hacker.
This person has also appeared under various names on whichever platform I am on to write to me disguised as someone else. Believe me, you will eventually become (almost) paranoid if you don’t know if people writing to you are real people or if this is a stalker disguised as another person or a hacker who hacked into another person’s account.
He will usually give away somehow that this is him, and not the other person, but sometimes it can be hard to know, such as in this message I received on Pinterest. In the last message the person wrote she was not on Twitter anymore, which could point to this person, who has stopped using Twitter years ago.
I am familiar with his writing style by now, but let me tell you, this is crazymaking behavior (also known as gaslighting)!
For example, he likes to put information into names. Em-ma: Emil’s ma, 1005 – I haven’t been with my older son, Emil, from the ages 5 to almost 10).
Some of the accounts look real enough, so I do not know if he created an account that looked real, or if he found this person, then logged into her account, or if he found an account, then changed the name when he contacted me.
If you encounter such a situation once, it is no big deal! But imagine encountering these problems frequently, sometimes daily, and almost anywhere you go and with whomever you come in contact with.
Have you ever been hacked?