Thursday 13 December 2007

'Hack' the virtual world!

My elder sister's yahoo mail has been hacked into recently.

The hacker pretended to be her and mass-emailed to her friends and clients, claiming that she was on a studying trip at Africa and got stranded in Africa, and asked the recipients to send money to a certain account.

The whole idea of it taunts my sister. She's worried that the hacker would know details of her credit card numbers, her friends' and clients' contact numbers and might trick them into doing his bidding or cheat them of their money.

Although we've read about hackers, reality doesn't set in until we meet one ourselves. It's very scary how the hacker even anticipated that my sister would try changing the password. He actually set up a system which prompted my sister for her credit card number when she tried changing her password. It's really very hair-raising when you are in a situation like that, that someone is watching over your online activities.

Her password is alpha-numeric, ungrammatical and is totally unrelated to herself. It's amazing how the hacker is able to decode it. It makes me wonder how much more vulnerable my email accounts are if my sister's is hacked into. It makes you feel that even the virtual world is so unsafe. We've all heard and read about how dangers are lurking in the virtual world, but when it really happens to you, it's a totally different story.

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