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China Elevator Stories
When Your X-Account Isn't Safe: My Experience with Repeated Security Breaches
A hacker keeps altering the settings of my X-account.
14/07/2024
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
Have you ever had to deal with a hacker who infiltrated all of your accounts and there was nothing you could do to make him stop?
I believe that one of the reasons I am being attacked by male hackers is simply because I am a woman. I have started writing my blog in 2012 and was never attacked until about 2016. In 2016 or 2017 (I can’t remember the exact year), I found that articles from my blog had been stolen and published on other sites that got a lot of readers but didn’t mention me as the author of the articles and didn’t link to the original posts.
In 2017, my then-husband took down my blog without prior notice. My ex-husband had been designing websites and had hosted them on a server he had paid for, and my blog had been running on his server for a few years because it didn’t cost any extra to host it on this server.
I am dealing with a few hackers all of the time (this is a by-product of being a blogger). I am also dealing with one particular hacker who is hacking into my computer and into my phone all the time. I have a guess on who this person might be but can’t say for certain.
My VPN is often being switched off on my phone by another person from afar. It has happened so many times that I couldn’t not notice. Switching off your VPN makes it possible for another person to track your exact location in real-time.
The person who switches off my VPN might be someone else than the other hacker I am dealing with, who has repeatedly hacked into my X-account and changed my settings.
I prefer to use X with a white background, which is the default setting. A few months ago, someone changed it to black (the ‘lights out’ setting). I have tried to change it back to the default setting various times, but whenever I wake up in the morning, it is changed back to black again.
My X-account is still under construction. I will post blog updates to new blog posts on X regularly once I have relinked all current articles – which should be soon unless my efforts are being sabotaged by another person. Feel free to follow me on X to receive notifications when new blog posts go up.
You may be wondering if this hacker leaves any traces. The answer is no. I usually receive a notification from X that there was a login to my account when I login to it. The notification usually goes like this: “There was a login to your account @RuthEleStories from a new device on 12 April 2024.”
I also receive an email notification when I log into my account.
When the hacker changes my settings, neither do I receive a notification that someone logged into my account, nor do I receive an email that notifies me of the login.
The normal way to go about this would be to change all your passwords. I have tried this approach before, a few times, but whenever I changed a password, this particular hacker was able to see which password I changed it to, and changing passwords wasn’t of much use. He is usually back in my accounts as soon as I have changed a password.
When dealing with a person who has installed spyware on your devices, you’d commonly be asked to take further security measures such as reinstalling your computer and resetting your smartphone to its factory defaults.
This makes sense if you are not dealing with severe stalking. I can tell you from my own observation that if you are dealing with an extreme stalker, following these steps may not be enough to deter your stalker from getting back into your phone or computer within a short period of time. If what you are dealing with is a serious stalking situation, your stalker will probably take any measures necessary to get back into your phone or computer.
The same is the case if I change my phone number.
People used to tell me that you can’t install spyware from afar, but you definitely can. This may have been the case in the past, but it is not the case anymore. My ex-husband hadn’t had access to my new phone or computer because, up until today, we have never met in person after I have left China, and neither did I hand my computer or phone over to anybody else. I have replaced both my computer and my phone once after leaving China.
Even so, he is back in my phone and in my computer. How do I know? Only a day after I was fired from my job, my ex-husband asked me if I was unemployed. There were a few other instances where he suddenly knew things about me that I hadn’t shared with him or other people he knows – including our children. This gave away that he had regained access to my phone and to my computer.
Have you ever had to deal with a hacker?