An Early Morning Facebook Hack Attack

This morning I received an instant message on Facebook from a former colleague of mine at Kaiser Permanente. Since it was barely 5 a.m., I was a little surprised anyone would want to chat with me at that hour.

“Hi. How are you,” she asked.

“Ok,” I replied. “How are you?”

“Not so good.”

Now this is a person I certainly count as a friend, but not a particularly close one; I’ve never been to her house, we’ve never shared a meal. I know her from work, and haven’t seen her in over two years. We occasionally share a hello on Facebook, catch up on how our kids are doing, but that’s all. This conversation was heading in a strange direction.

“Uh oh,” I replied. “What’s wrong?”

I thought that she must be very upset, that there must be a serious tragedy in her life, for her to reach out to me at 5 a.m. with a personal problem. A few seconds later, her response came, and a light began to go on:

“I’m stuck with my family in Spain.”

Really? In Spain. At the end of August, with two young school-age boys either back in school or preparing to go back this week. I decided to play along, see where things went.

“Wow,” I wrote. "Weather problem?”

And the final response was all I needed to know about what was going on.

“We went on a short vacation to visit resort and we got mugged last night at a gun point. All cash, cell credit card was stolen off me.”

So my friend had been hacked. On Facebook. I know she doesn’t take “short vacations” to Europe — at our station in society, a trip to Europe is a major deal. A short vacation is to Tahoe. And the part that read “to visit resort” was the real giveaway. “Oh honey, let’s take a short trip to Spain to visit resort…” And getting mugged “at a gun point” was the final straw. This woman used to be my editor. That’s not a sentence she would write, even under the most stressful of circumstances.

So now, even the Facebook chat feature is subject to hacking. A more sophisticated hustler could have easily convinced me, at least for a while, that I was speaking to the person represented. While I don’t give out money or credit card information online, a canny hustler could easily finagle information from me that could be useful in other ways.

So be careful out there. Online chicanery is getting ever more sophisticated. I for one am used to being rather relaxed on Facebook, seeing it as a social gathering place without much need for caution or care. Apparently, those days are behind us.

TODAY IN HISTORY:

1963 - The Hotline between the leaders of the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union goes into operation.

1967 - Thurgood Marshall is confirmed as the first African American Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

1984 - STS-41-D: The Space Shuttle Discovery takes off on its maiden voyage.