The Whole Hacking Story

The terrorism began last Saturday morning. The day started off lovely enough. Biceps and I were enjoying the cool morning, windows down, radio pumping while we drove to a large, local church to deliver a watermelon bowling alley we had been hired to build over the weekend. Pretty normal stuff for us.

I received a notification on my phone that I had a new email. Opening it, the innocent looking email warned me that my homepage was all in Arabic. The emailer even mentioned one of my projects that they liked and they had a legitimate looking yahoo email address.

I opened my site, thinking surely this person was mistaken. They weren’t. Poop. Crap. Dang.

The background to my site immediately turned black. And, then I saw something rather similar to this at the top of the page.

Photo Source
Striped colors decorated the fist in green, white and red. The hacker’s name was proudly scrolling across the tab bar and the top of the page. (I don’t want to give this moron any satisfaction, so I’m not going to tell you who it was.)

Photo Source
Almost everything on the page was in Arabic-very similar to this. (But, joke is on you, you funny hackers-this is the Lord’s prayer in Arabic. Boo yeah.)

I scrolled down even further to read a few sentences in English, touting how horrible America is and how great Syria and Palestine are. (Since when did they become friends?)

The hacker made death threats to all U.S. citizens, collectively and individually. Turds.

I called, texted and emailed my wonderful web guy. Sorry, Cole. I might have been freaking out a little.

But, just a little.

My web guy had his hands full dealing with terrorism and a crashing server on one side and this on the other. I wonder which he would have preferred?

The rest of the weekend my site looked like this. What’s that? You don’t see anything. Yep, that about sums it up.

I would like to say that my immediate reaction was enjoying the forced blogging vacation and casting my cares on the Lord. The reality was-it took me about 5 hours to get to that point and actually believe it.

And a glass of red wine.

But, hey-that’s down from the 5,000 hours that I freaked out when my site took a nose dive in 2011 with absolutely no recovery option. So, I think I’m doing pretty good…

I contacted these guys, and I will admit, I felt a little Nancy Drew about the whole matter. Side note-did you know the FBI actually emails you back when you email them?
The FBI had real people that cared about this bizarre midwest blogging wife. They aren’t just some vest sporting, coffee drinking, cool sunglass wearing, entity driving around in a bad sedan and hanging out at the White House.

 

And that’s where I’ll leave you. My web guy jumped through several hoops and I am back up and running. The FBI has probably moved on to bigger fish.

But, if this joker gets caught, you will be the first(s) to know. Thanks for sticking this out and seeing me through this.