hackers

so this week has been a little rough. not only was i coming back from hawaii, but i was also getting back to school after spring break, i've been trying to complete my moral character application for the bar exam, and i was a victim of identity theft.

this last one really pissed me off.

so on tuesday, i wake up and my phone is blinking as usual, signifying that i have new email. i don't check it right away because, again, as usual, i'm running late and have about 15 minutes before i have to head to the BART in order to get to my 9:30 class on time.

at some point, while i'm bored on MUNI, i remember the blinking light. i get my phone out and check my email. imagine my surprise when i have not one, not two, not three, but four emails from itunes giving me my receipts for the purchases i apparently made the day before. $200 worth of purchases.

i flip out.

this is the second time in 2 months i've had an account hacked into. last month it was my ebay account, where some idiot hacked in, bid on 2 video games from the UK, and won. thing was that ebay will email me to let me know that i won these items, and when i got those emails i quickly contacted the sellers and told them it was some sort of mistake (a word of advice: ebay sellers are not sympathetic to the fact that your account has been broken into), disconnected my paypal, and closed my ebay account altogether. after this happened, i changed the passwords for as many accounts as i could remember, but apparently forgot to do so for my itunes.

back to tuesday morning. i get to campus after reading these emails and am a mess. i'm a mess because i've been working really hard to save money lately. like, really hard. and the fact that someone could just come in and screw me out of $200 sucked. and THEN i realized that, if this person has my passwords, chances are he has all my other stuff too (i suspect that when i used limewire to download some music, i got a virus or someone put some spyware on my computer or something), including my social security number, etc. it just made me feel really...exposed and violated.

so i contacted itunes. (can we just pause for a second to discuss how hard it is to actually contact itunes? why don't they have a simple number you can call?) i ended up "chatting" with some customer service guy who was all in all really friendly and helpful. he told me to contact my bank and file and claim, and itunes would cooperate with the bank in any way they could. so i contacted my bank, filed my claim, got the $200 credited to my account, and closed the card that was used. then i called the credit bureaus to put a fraud alert on my credit reports. then i sat there for an hour and thought of every single vendor i used to buy things online (amazon, target, jcrew, gap, old navy, victoria's secret, audible, anthropologie, urban outfitters, t-mobile, you name it, i thought of it) and changed all of my passwords.

it's been such a colossal pain in the ass, i can't even tell you.

and now i'm freaking out over every tiny thing i do on the internet. so, as a parting thought, here are a few tips my computer savvy friends offered me:

1. close your email every single time you're done looking at your messages. don't just let you email stay open when you're on your computer.
2. get a good antivirus. go ahead and spend the money on it, it's worth it. and scan your computer regularly.
   
3. do not download music from limewire.
4. try as much as possible not to do online banking.
5. don't leave your web browsers on and/or open unless you're actively on the internet. like your email, this just widens the window high-tech jerks can use to "see" your stuff.
6. check your credit report regularly if you do a lot of buying/selling online.
7. don't save your credit/debit card information to any of your online accounts. it doesn't really take a whole lot of time to plug that information in each time you purchase something. and think about it, if my debit card info wasn't saved to my itunes account (though i think for itunes you actually need to have a card on file), it may not have been so easy for those thieving bastards to steal my money.