By Mark Patterson
By some estimates, 600 MILLION cyber -attacks occur each day. Please advise whoever compiles those stats to raise last Monday’s count to 600 million plus one. I got hacked. Violated, humiliated, defenseless, -you name it, I feel it. Plus a few other sentiments I don’t talk about away from the golf course. But post-trauma prison shower vibes aren’t the worst of it. What most ices my spine is the knowing that somewhere (probably India, judging from accents) somebody lounging in tighty whities, laptop in hand on a yellow 1970’s beanbag, came very close to BECOMING me, while confidently snacking on Doritos (languid chomping accompanied taps of warp-speed typing), “Marsala Mayhem” flavor I suppose. That’s actually a variety sold over there by your friends at Frito Lay. For some reason, I looked that up. While my shaken ego would prefer to imagine something like NASA-a well-organized cookie-cutter setup full of space-age machines manned by guys wearing short sleeves with short ties and pocket protectors, truthfully, it didn’t take some hacking equivalent of the New York Yankees to go yard on me, more like the Toledo Mud Hens.
After all, I invited them in. Literally. Frustrated by a sudden, inexplicable (cross my heart, I keep my keystrokes genteel on social media) suspension from “X,” I quickly concluded that some sinister usurper had commandeered my Elon-account and posted amuck doing God knows what to a rep curated from nearly 10,000 hours in front of a tv cam. The world is out to get me, I always say, an outlook that does little to lower blood pressure or cultivate friends, but should have precluded any naive assumption that a legit-looking logo or quoted “testimonials” (the childish spellings I missed when scanning those have me kicking myself) meant that “James” actually worked for Best Buy.
He sure didn’t. And cleverly, I deduced as much. Right after I granted remote control (of our desktop Dell), giving up my name, phone number, address, and, of course, debit info, complete with security code, which I recited AND typed in. I would have coughed up my mother’s maiden name, I’m pretty sure, and swallowed whole the part about Chinese hackers that could only be evicted by some state-of-the-art “firewall” contraption soon enroute to my home. But luckily, you can’t fool ME for long, nosireeee, and how shrewd I was to catch on when they asked for a $2K “security” deposit on said machine-which they actually showed an image of. The thing looked like it could thwart the entire People’s Liberation Army-let alone one insolent hacker.
The war though, would be to salvage my checking account and personal info. Whatever info, I was advised, that might have been floating around in my Email. Oh yeah, I ushered “James” into that as well, on his pretext of checking for communiques from “x” that might explain my exile. Stock accounts, Amazon, modest royalties from mineral holdings downstate, etc- I could only conclude that EVERYTHING had been breached. Try remembering what “everything” entails. In a frenzy, I changed passwords to inspired strings of unintelligible gibberish (toodles to Paul Skenes and Caitlin Clark). Nearly certain that my smart phone had somehow been tricked -up to commit terrorist acts 10,000 miles away, I rushed to Verizon and was reassured to the contrary by an employee mildly bemused at my paranoia. I took said bemusement as a good sign but still find myself fingering that I- phone for tell-tale heat. (That’s how you know it’s triggering drone strikes halfway across the globe.)
Closer to home (literally), that ubiquitous commercial telling folks to be afraid, be VERY afraid, that their home title probably has been appropriated by a mere phone call suddenly engendered night terrors. For real. My mother always contended that dreams are “complicated” things replete with pre-cognitive elements never portending what they seem to. But when my slumbering subconscious trots out CGI of our house walking away (actually, it kind of scooted , northward, toward rt 8), I don’t need Sigmund Freud to interpret. I needed LifeLock, I figured, and for a mere $489 per year, they vowed to hobble my home and HAVE returned Jessica Lange (as before, in character from that steamy bread scene in “The Postman Always Rings Twice”) to top billing in my dreams. But DID the soothing mid-western accent that took my payment info REALLY represent security? Or more self-inflicted misery? How do you know whom to trust?
Panicked, I did what any red-blooded technophobe would: I called in the marines. One ex-marine, that is, with an advertisement touting the good ole American know how to combat all MANNER of hacker assaults. But how to make certain the whole Sempre Fi thing was not ANOTHER elaborate ruse. Which theoretically (and this did cross my mind) could have meant visiting yet a second layer of self-imposed suffering upon the me that exists in the circuitry of a stammering , six-year-old Dell desktop (that might, or might not, have fallen prey to the original sin of Chinese hackers).
Talk about a rabbit hole. If you’re keeping score, this recounting has now invoked three nations, three types of tech gadgets, two military units, one villain, one presumptive hero, a popular social media platform, two professional sports franchises, one eccentric billionaire abruptly ostracized by Donald Trump, and an iconic snack food-not to mention the (purposely) demeaning image of a tacky, outdated thing to sit on. Think I was confused?
In case you’re curious: Mr. Marine performed true to his word, detecting and eradicating several spy programs cleverly hidden within my computer. I heard that his efforts have inspired the advent of a new medal for “virtual valor,” the “Cyber Star”, I think, which he is slated to receive on the White House lawn. Right after that MMA fight reportedly in the works. Fittingly, the comforting iPhone dude soon hit the power-ball, bought control of the entire company, and installed himself as face of a new ad campaign. (spoiler alert: Look for clips of my panicked visit to their Calcutta store.) That fabled New York baseball team sits, as of this writing, second in the American League Eastern division. This month’s mineral royalties came to us, rather than the middle east. Beanbag chairs, I see, have made a modest comeback, while pocket protectors, sadly, have not.
As for myself, would you believe all that gullibility went unpunished? Although the $250 debited from my checking count would have amounted to steering over a cliff and sustaining mere scratches, that exact sum circled back to me some 20 hours later in the form of a Best Buy gift card. Part of the scam , I have since learned, devised for me to recite them the card numbers, as a sweet little cherry, I suppose, flavor-enhanced by legitimizing imprimatur, on top of that 2k First Choice sundae the bad guys were bibbing up for. Unopened, that card sits and teases me from my dresser. What if it’s boobey trapped? Or rigged to summon some swarming team of SWAT agents? I’m not joking. Not at all. See what this incident did to my mind?
And what about “James”? Sadly, he soon learned that Karma really IS a “B” word as Mr. Tiger Shark (please imagine Robert Shaw reciting this part), it so happens, found him wading just 50 feet off the coast of Mumbai. Even hackers take breaks, I guess, from hoisting heavy laptops and teeing up complete fools. Authorities stated the animal probably was attracted by the scent of Doritos. Gota love those Marsala Mayhem chips.
Oh yeah, almost forgot: I’m back in good graces on “X.” Look me up @pattersonpicks1Sent from Outlook
Mark Patterson
