Sunday, December 12, 2010

my stupidity n paranoia intersect

I'm sure you all had better things to do this evening than pay attention to internet news, but there's been a huge Gawker hack. As in, the hackers have all the Gawker IDs, email addresses, and (encrypted) passwords of 1.5 million users. Of which I am one, which you may have figured out by all the reposts of shit from jezebel y'all get from me.

Of course, I provided jezebel with my real, main email, like an idiot. Of course I used the password that I use for 80% of all my internet business (the perimenopause is fucking with my memory, I can only handle very few passwords, yo). I am fucking stupid and overly trusting that my firewall and virus checker and that little lock symbol that appears in my browser when I'm buying something will save me from having all my money stolen from me.

I am all extremely paranoid and freaking out now. I already had an ativan today, so taking another one probably isn't a good idea, but. I immediately changed my jezebel password. I immediately changed my email password to something completely different. I then spent several hours changing my password on all the online shopping sites I use that I could remember using the original password on, as well as on my Sprint account. I deleted my stored credit card info from the shopping sites. I don't bank or pay my bills online, so that I don't have to worry about. I don't think.

Do you think there's some hacker somewhere buying expensive yoga pants from Athleta with my debit card even as we speak?!??? Like I don't have enough to worry about. Bastards.

xoxo

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just to allay your (financial) fears, you're not responsible if someone illicitly charges something against your debit card, so long as you report it in something like 60 days.

So don't sweat it too much, your bank account won't be drained. And very good chance, with 1.5 million logins stolen that 1) they'll never put your old, now changed, passwords together with the various sites you can login to and 2) if the password actually *was* encrypted on the Gawker site, they won't be able to decrypt it anyway.

So your money should be safe, no matter what EK may be doing to get back at you for all that medicine you've been forcing on her.

malevolent andrea said...

Theoretically I know that, but I let the other paranoid, freaking-out people on the interwebs whip me up into a frenzy. :-)