Hacking problem and general RANT with occasional lolz

DialgaBritesMom

DialgaBritesMom

I tooadally promise it'll be toooadally fun!!
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Hello ponies.

We usually deal with our own "stuff" privately. But I want this to be put out in the community, so feel free to pass it along, along with my statement that WE ARE TAKING WHATEVER POSSIBLE LEGAL STEPS WE CAN (And that whoever is doing this is an a@@hat of the highest degree).

Someone hacked into our router. I know this because I happened to sign in online to change some of its website blocking settings due to some online interactions that were causing great stress to DB (and b/c he needs more than just me nagging him not to go to that site to argue with people; anyone who knows us knows that we are not a "typical" family and things do not always run smoothly in our lives and interactions due to all kinds of stuff).

Back to the story: There was an unknown device/computer in the list of devices using our router, called "Dementor". I changed its name back to Jim, because in my naivete I couldn't believe someone else was on our network and figured something weird had happend, "that's all" (Oh brother; esp given the circumstances). Then I changed all the passwords, etc, changed our network stuff, signed out, and signed back in yadda yadda. "Jim" was gone. And yet, the PC named Jim is still here in our house, but just not powered on (Nor was it powered on when I saw "Dementor" and changed it ("Back" I thought) to "Jim"). So at that point it was obvious to me that someone else had been hanging out on our router/network. In some security setting or other, I saw access by "unknown" a day or two ago. When I access it, I'm called [username] (won't put it up for obv reasons), which confirmed it.

Now I know that someone (call him/her"B") who is acquainted with the person ("A") with whom DB had the argument told them they would "see what they could do about it" when A complained about DB and their argument to his/her public at large on dA, and 'getting revenge' was discussed at some point. So you can guess that I think this person B is the culprit, or knows someone who is the culprit. And since some of the people in the discussion had pony avatars, I am voicing myself here, in case anyone here has an idea who might be involved. I know some of the FiM fans hang out at other pony communities. This nonsense happened on dA, but as you know, we are everywhere. :p

Now here is the kicker.

Today, I went into msconfig to shut off some of the crap that starts up when I boot up because I'm sick of it taking forever to boot up :) When done, I hit restart. If I hadn't been looking at the screen I would have missed it. A blue screen flashed up for about one second (if that long). On the blue screen was a square smiley face with tongue sticking out, and underneath the words, "He's dead, Jim".


Right.

Are we supposed to have a sense of humor about this? I love to take the bad stuff and find the humor in it, but this? Nah. Complete invasion of privacy on so many levels. Fear mongering. I suppose that was the intent. Congrats on their success. Did they make the world a better place? *rhetorical question*

So pony community, if you happen to know of people who would stoop to this level, please let them know that we are taking steps, we are on top of it, and I take this personally. We take steps here to keep DB safe and to rein him in when he starts going overboard. I take it as a death threat, not a silly trolling prank. And we will deal with it as such. The FBI can't do much with it, but they have made a note of it, so it IS in their system. We will be calling the local police and also scrubbing our computer for whatever BS has been placed in it.

If DB ever did something like this to any of the people online who torment him over stupid s#$%, he'd be in the deepest doo doo you can imagine. I expect others to behave the way he is expected to behave. Pah. I don't know why I keep trying to see the best in people. The internet sure seems to bring out the worst in many of us.

If any of you have any other suggestions, please LMK. PMs are fine. Here is fine.

I am pretty easy-going and laissez faire about life (have to be!) but am really really hot about this.
 
This is why I ignore/block/hide troll comments on dA.... and return I have a very peaceful account.

At this point though the police are going to have to put a stop to it. I would keep your computer completely shut down in the mean time.
 
LightningSilver-Light said:
This is why I ignore/block/hide troll comments on dA.... and return I have a very peaceful account.

At this point though the police are going to have to put a stop to it. I would keep your computer completely shut down in the mean time.
Click to expand...

thanks for the response LS-L

he blocks them, but they use other accounts to beg him not to block them. and/or send their friends to leave comments. hnnng. Then often, he can't leave it alone, but that's our problem on this end. Meanwhile, police say, keep an eye on it, and if it continues they will send out a detective.
 
I've dealt with that, and just continued to not respond and reported the other accounts if they did anything reportable~ one was bright enough to have a journal posted about how deviantArt staff is "so stupid for banning their other account and they just made this new one".

I got them banned rather quick~

You can run into this sort of thing all over the internet with every place you go to, no matter how legit it seems. If people troll you and you react, they'll make up reasons to do absurd stuff and make up lies about you and your info and nonsense.

Depending on your case, you may be able to report it as cyber bullying. But that depends on the nature of the situation~
 
I'm so sorry this happened to you, DBM. I'll never understand why people can't just walk away from a disagreement online. It seems some idiots constantly have the misinformed belief that the internet will keep them anonymus, but eventually bad behviour like this hacking crap catches up to them. I hope karma is quick to send a little justice to the jerks that are doing this to you. It's childish and cruel and they need to learn to play nice quickly.

Ugh. Why are some people such complete and utter wastes of space?
 
What, exactly, do you expect the police to do? Since this originated on deviantART, they can't easily get the real-world identities of the people who did this. It's also most likely that the perpetrators are outside of your police's jurisdiction. Do you expect the cops to let the police of another state or country to go and hunt these people down?

You need to improve your own home security (firewall, anti-malware, etc) and severely restrict what your kid can access. From what you've said in this thread, he doesn't seem to know when to let up, so it's possible that even more of your information or hardware could be hacked next time.
 
Phekzhen said:
What, exactly, do you expect the police to do? Since this originated on deviantART, they can't easily get the real-world identities of the people who did this.

You need to improve your own home security (firewall, anti-malware, etc) and severely restrict what your kid can access. From what you've said in this thread, he doesn't seem to know when to let up, so it's possible that even more of your information or hardware could be hacked next time.
Click to expand...

Hacking is illegal no matter how you look at it, and police can contact deviantArt to obtain the information of the people hacking. Actually they may not even need to go the route of deviantArt, could probably straight up track the hackers' conduct from the hackings themselves. (Such as locations, IP address, that good stuff that tells everything that needs to be told.)

I do agree that if you're running a Windows machine, after this it would do you good to maybe switch to a Macintosh. Macs have approx. 10 layers of pre-built-in virus protection coding and require little to no maintenance for virus protection, and nearly 0% problems~
 
Phekzhen said:
What, exactly, do you expect the police to do? Since this originated on deviantART, they can't easily get the real-world identities of the people who did this. It's also most likely that the perpetrators are outside of your police's jurisdiction. Do you expect the cops to let the police of another state or country to go and hunt these people down?

You need to improve your own home security (firewall, anti-malware, etc) and severely restrict what your kid can access. From what you've said in this thread, he doesn't seem to know when to let up, so it's possible that even more of your information or hardware could be hacked next time.
Click to expand...


Quite honestly i expect that the police can do nothing. I want it on the record in the (unlikely, i realize that, but this is 2014 and the world is not a pretty place, now, is it?) event that it is a real threat. I wasted all of five minutes of their time (my taxes?) on a non-emergency phone call. If it continues, I'm not just going to sit back and go "oh my bad for not having a geek level knowledge of how to tweak the advanced settings. Or for not realizing that the default router settings are more geared toward making sure there is no inconvenience to someone who wants to play online games rather than simple home security. Never mind then.". If someone is bullied, does one let the bully off scot free because the bullied person doesn't know how to stand up for themselves?

As for security, all that has been fairly well taken care of all along (CLEARLY not enough), and any improvements I could figure out to make by hunting down things on the internet about the advanced router settings (service provider tech support seems to either know less than i do or isn't willing to be bothered to walk me through the more intricate security steps) have been done. Spent all day yesterday doing that, but I'm sure it's still not enough. If you have any concrete router and firewall security setting suggestions, i am all ears ( eyes). I hope that i can find a user guide for the router we have that is specific to our service provider, that covers all those little "only advanced users should mess with this" settings, and go through it line by line. Seeing how easily someone hacked in despite previous relatively conscienscious security measures, makes me (uselessly) angry and determined to thwart further attempts. Probably futile if someone really wants to do damage but at least will keep out the less determined jerks. If i knew how, i would dig and try to figure out where they came from to start with. I realize that is tedious work even for someone who knows how to do it.

Access to the internet has been severely restricted at this point. Direct supervision only. No automatic connections. I alone know the long and complicated network password. Problematic websites and "ghost browsing" blocked, from the router's *advanced* settings and a third party program. Other concrete ideas are welcome.


Actually, for the record, it's (for a change) the other people who don't know when to let up in this case, you know, using multiple accounts to keep making their point, he keeps blocking them, etc, but that's too long a story and not the point of this thread.

My main concern now is coming up with as much security as we can, above and beyond what we already had in place.
 
LightningSilver-Light said:
Hacking is illegal no matter how you look at it, and police can contact deviantArt to obtain the information of the people hacking. Actually they may not even need to go the route of deviantArt, could probably straight up track the hackers' conduct from the hackings themselves. (Such as locations, IP address, that good stuff that tells everything that needs to be told.)

I do agree that if you're running a Windows machine, after this it would do you good to maybe switch to a Macintosh. Macs have approx. 10 layers of pre-built-in virus protection coding and require little to no maintenance for virus protection, and nearly 0% problems~
Click to expand...

LOL i have friends who are All about their Macs. I tell them just wait, as the popularity of macs increases, the hackers will follow. But it is definitely a consideration for future machines!
 
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evilbunnyfoofoo said:
I'm so sorry this happened to you, DBM. I'll never understand why people can't just walk away from a disagreement online. It seems some idiots constantly have the misinformed belief that the internet will keep them anonymus, but eventually bad behviour like this hacking crap catches up to them. I hope karma is quick to send a little justice to the jerks that are doing this to you. It's childish and cruel and they need to learn to play nice quickly.

Ugh. Why are some people such complete and utter wastes of space?
Click to expand...

I like how you think, evilbunny :cool:
 
OMG this is so weird. My husband caught someone trying to hack our router too! They were trying to access certain files that pertained to his research on the Federal Reserve and Economics for his book, but those files are no longer existing on that drive, so they got squat. Then I noticed my computer was not connecting to the internet, and when I traced the signal, it was connected to no only our internet connection, but this other one that was listed as "unknown" access...

I do not have a Deviant art account, and no real issues anywhere else, so weird...
 
ARGH! I just read this and I'm angry for you, Nan! I can only imagine how frustrating it is to try to wade through all the tech crap trying to secure your computer even more.

I really don't understand why people want to continue to harass others and that kind of behavior directed at DB is just no good. Hope he is coping with it alright. I think, given your unique (and cool!) family, reporting this is a smart step on the very very very slim chance it goes beyond cyber world.
 
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