Blind Prophecy

So yesterday’s adventure in hacking seems to be behind me now. Aside from some damage to my reputation and a handful of deleted emails, the hackers didn’t manage to do much measurable damage.

Of course, the whole experience was frightening and upsetting. It appears that they managed to get into my yahoo account somehow (I admit, I wasn’t using a terribly clever password and it was the same password I use on a whole bunch of sites that require sing-ups), and from there they sent “reset password” requests to gmail, which got them into my facebook account. Once they got that far, they set up a dummy account and had anything emailed to my gmail auto-forwarded to the dummy account, then spammed everybody who I put into my contacts over the last 5 or so years with a hoax about being stuck in Scotland with no money and no way to get home. Then they deleted my address books before google and yahoo suspended the accounts for sending spam. By this morning I had access to the accounts again, changed how password resets work for my most important accounts, and replaced every vulnerable password I could remember.

The scary thing was realizing how much more damage they could have done if they had been patient and skipped the scam email. If they had simply monitored my accounts for a while after gaining access, they might have pieced together my credit card info, my tax documents and identity, how to access my bank accounts, my old paypal account, etc. I’m definitely rethinking how I save and link these things together. Is my convenience worth the risk of a breach?

Anyway, this morning was my first final of the semester in Civil Procedure. I think it went well. There’s never any way to predict how well you actually did on law school exams until grades come out, but I’m confident that I recognized the specific issues and questions our professor was driving at and managed to avoid a few red herrings he slipped in there. Now I have a week to prepare for Constitutional Law (next Wednesday).

After the final, I ate lunch out in the sun underneath one of Fordham’s various odd statues that sorta reminded me of how I felt after 36 hours of hacker drama and reading the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

I’m heading to happy hour celebration with the BarBri folks in a few minutes, but I only get one night off until Finals are over.

In the meanwhile, NYC friends and loved ones (plus those willing to travel), mark your calendars for Saturday, May 29. I’m don’t have plans locked down yet, but I hope to celebrate my freedom from the dorms, completion of my first year of law school, JFK’s birthday and the fifth annual celebration of my 29th birthday that night*. Right now I’m leaning toward gathering at one of the piano bars at Christopher Street and 7th (e.g. Duplex or Monster or Marie’s Crisis … so many choices for gay piano bars!), but I’m open to suggestions. Don’t forget that you have Monday off, so I’m not accepting many excuses. I’ll be announcing my plans next week and sending out invitations… you’ll know it’s me and not a scam artist because I’ll use relatively proper grammar and won’t ask you to wire me money.

* for those of you trying to do the math, remember that the first celebration of my 29th birthday was when I actually turned 29, the next year we marked the second annual celebration of my 29th birthday, and so on.

Filed under: law school, personal by Jere Keys