<p>So I have a gmail account, and today at work (internship) I got a call from a close friend asking why I was instant messaging him and calling him horrible curse words. I had been working in my lab fro the past 5 hours, so I asked him to save the chat and I assured him that wasn’t me. So when I got home and logged into Gmail, the language had been changed to Chinese and there was an auto-responder set up to reply with:
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<p>After changing the language back to English, I realized that the hacker had deleted over a months worth of email. Thank god he was an idiot and simply put them in “Trash” without deleting them. And these are very important emails.
So then I looked in my IMing history and found that the hacker was having conversations with my friends, calling them horrible curse words. I know he was doing the talking because of this one chat (this was the only non-explicit chat):
I hadn’t emailed this friend from that email address before, so he didn’t know who I was.</p>
<p>And then the worst news came - my book’s website had been compromised. He deleted all the content, including the one thing not backed up - the forum
He replaced it with an image saying “HACKED BY DISTURBED5X” I quickly reset the website but the forum will take a lot of time to restore :(</p>
<p>I then tried to use System Restore to restore my computer. It didn’t work (I tried 6 different dates ranging from February to yesterday). FYI, Norton Internet Security 2008 has been running full blast. It did a full scan last night and found nothing. I made it do another scan and it found nothing. So I installed SpyBot Search and Destroy, and it found dozens of malicious cookies as well as a registry changed that blocked system restore - installed last night.
I did notice something was weird when I woke up this morning. I always leave my computer on screensaver while I sleep, but it had restarted itself, probably installing the system restore blocker :(</p>
<p>I am very mad with Norton, and I feel violated. This jerk impersonated me, and then was such an idiot he didn’t even know how to delete email. He/She is pathetic. Stupid hackers.
Sorry for the long post/rant. But are there any more precautions I should take. Dell’s outstanding Gold Tech support (extreme sarcasm here) is “not allowed to support hacking or virus issues” but the nice (not sarcastic here) lady advised me to reinstall windows. But IU have the feeling this was mostly a brute force entry through Gmail. But I’m still worried.
By the way, my old password had literally been a string of random numbers and letters that I NEVER shared with ANYONE.</p>
<p>I’m not too sure what to say since we’ve got no clue how this freak show hacked into your account.</p>
<p>Do you use a wireless network? Is it secure (password protected)? Do you have gmail “remember” your login information?</p>
<p>I’m not sure if it’s the cause here, but it’s possible for people using your wireless network (from a nearby building, car parked in front of your residence, etc) to access your router and view information stored on your computer (perhaps cookies & saved login information for gmail?). </p>
<p>I understand how you feel frustrated with Norton. The malicious cookies and stuff you found with SpyBot could be the cause, but probably not… I’ve found malicious stuff with SpyBot even without evident computer problems.</p>
<p>That’s all I can really say at the moment… my best advice is: protect your network if you can and invest in an external hard drive to back everything up (documents, music, email, etc.)</p>
<p>I do a lot of web programming (for a hobby) and I think it’s pretty crazy to think he did all that through a cookie. </p>
<p>I’m not sure about reinstalling windows. </p>
<p>For him to have gotten a cookie onto your computer, you would have had to have visited some web page of his (or at least interacted with it in one way or another). Can you think of any websites like that you might have visited?</p>
<p>If you’re antivirus program is anything like mine, it basically calls all cookies malicious. So I doubt that your cookies were the problem. </p>
<p>Bummer about your forum. Do you host it yourself or does some company host it? You might be able to request a backup. If not, forums are very easy to backup; just a quick MySQL dump would stick all your database contents into an SQL file, pure text. (assuming you don’t know)</p>
<p>If you are running the server yourself, make sure you are updated to the most recent releases of whatever you’re running. </p>
<p>And I doubt it was a brute force; that would take AGES. Check any server logs if you have access to anything like that.</p>
<p>I googled his username, and he has some accounts on forums, including one called Insane Masterminds, which is a forum “where people can come to learn about hacking, programming, web design, graphics and more, or just chat.” According to his youtube channel, he programs in Liberty Basic. I’m not really sure what can be done with this information, but maybe someone who knows more about computers does.</p>
<p>just something you might think about, there is a person with a stream account ID that is disturbed5X [Steam</a> Community :: ID :: Disturbed5X](<a href=“Steam Community :: Error”>Steam Community :: Error)</p>
<p>just fyi (try and make sure it’s him before you do anything that would be payback, thoug payback would be funny :D)</p>
<p>haha, i just googled the username, too. how dumb is it to hack an account leaving your username to other things?
sounds like the person, though, if they couldn’t even delete an e-mail.</p>
<p>Yeah, if I was the OP, I would call the cops. This guy has accounts on multiple forums about hacking and counter-strike, he says he’s only 15, I’m sure they could find him.</p>
<p>Edit: You can spam him on these two accounts, too, if you want.</p>
<p>I would like to call the cops, but I doubt they care about something like this. And I already deleted a malicious program Spybot S&D found (that Norton didn’t) :(</p>
<p>NEVER EVER use Norton. It is, for all intents and purposes, useless.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, I can’t help with anything but I hope you’re able to piece everything back together. As someone who also relies on computers a lot and has had a virus wipe stuff out in the past, I know how devastating it can be.</p>
<p>I want to email him and just make up a story that I have called the police and they were able to trace him to his computer, just to freak him out
But I don’t want him to call my lie and then try to hack my computer for the rest of his life :(</p>
<p>This is what you call a script kiddy. He’s not fit to be called a “hacker”. </p>
<p>No doubt, he has left trails of information that can be used by law enforcement.</p>
<p>I suggest contacting a lawyer (or if you can’t afford one, legal aid). I’m sure a nice lawsuit will cover some of your damages. From here, you can arrange for authorities to subpoena his accounts, to acquire his historic IPs, from which his ISP can be contacted to nail his (literal) physical address. It doesn’t matter if the IPs were issued months ago – the ISP’s DHCP server should have logs about what modem they were assigned to.</p>
:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:</p>
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