Page 30 - 2021 SPRING Sojourner Newsletter

National Sojourners
7942 R Cluny Ct
Springfield, VA 22153

Phone: 703-765-5000
Fax: 703-765-8390
E-mail: hq@nationalsojourners.org
www.nationalsojourners.org

OH NO! “I’VE BEEN HACKED!” – no, not me, but I see this all the time from folks where friends
are reporting that a strange email or message has come from them asking for money or some-
thing equally strange. SO, let’s get the terminology straight: “HACKING” means someone has
actually gone into your computer and is now in control. Meaning, you can’t do anything because
THEY are in control. Generally, hackers are going after lucrative (financial) sites, military and
government or contractor sites, because they want to steal things and then either sell them or
make them public. Also, those entities have deeper pockets financially than you or me. Unless
you fall into that previous category, chances are what actually happened with you is most proba-
bly one of two scenarios: (1) You’ve gone to a website and clicked on something that had a malware payload
embedded in it, and in the process it now has been installed on your system. Now, that malware can be any-
thing from an innocuous message telling you that they have control – whether they do or not, or they can ac-
tually erase or encrypt all your files and tell you that you have to pay to get the decryption key to unlock all
your files. (2) A FRIEND of yours who has your email address in their address-book has had that happen to
them, and the “netbot” has gone into their address-book and scavenged all the email contacts and then de-
parted leaving little or no trace of their activity behind. #2 is the MOST LIKELY scenario involved in cases like
these. They have your email address and name, so they create a bogus email to everyone in that friend’s ad-
dress-book, figuring that most of the people will know who you are, then they cobble together a HYPERLINK
that LOOKS LIKE it’s coming from you. If you actually hover over that link, you’ll see that while the plaintext
LOOKS like it’s from you, it’s really from someone you never heard of before. This is called SPOOFING –
someone is pretending to be you, and masquerading their identity in hopes you won’t be very diligent or sus-
picious since the email/message comes from a ‘friend” and you’ll just click on it … which, by the way, is prob-
ably how your friend’s computer got compromised in the first place.
BE SUSPICIOUS, especially of any email/message you don’t expect. Look for grammar and syntax that ap-
pears to be just a little “off” – and when in doubt, just delete it completely without clicking on it. You can al-
ways ask your friend if s/he actually sent you that message – and that’s when … VOILA … someone else says
“I’VE BEEN HACKED!” and the misuse of the term continues. NOPE, they were SPOOFED!
And, think about this … IF you were indeed “hacked” – the hacker would not want you to know it, and would
sit silently in the background and would stop you from warning your friends about being hacked.
And, if you and your friends don’t change your web browsing and email behaviors, you can safely bet this
will continue to be a problem in the future.—Bill Hickey, IT Chairman