So this week has been a special little social media armageddon for me.
My Instagram account (which I’ve built up over the last 14 years to 5k followers) was hacked on Monday. The attacker had taken over one of my friends’ accounts and pretended to be them, messaged and phished me. I was doing grocery at the time, my brain full of a recipe list I was trying to recall as I hunted down ingredients, when I received a message like this:
And, distracted and multitasking as I was, I thoughtlessly did as they instructed, thinking I was “helping them.” I was, except “them” was not who I thought. Within seconds of a verification link, they had locked me out of my account, changed all my credentials and edited my username with underscores and numbers.
I’ve spent the rest of the week since trying in vain to contact support via both Instagram and Facebook, while the hacker posted Bitcoin crypto-spam on my Stories and attempted to swindle more people out of their information while pretending to be me.
Wednesday night was the worst, as that’s when the hacker messaged pretty much everyone in my DMs, attempting to steal more accounts. Most of them saw through it and contacted me separately, confirming that I was, indeed, hacked. A few were sadly hacked as well.
Photo: Lorenzo Di Cola | NurPhoto via Getty Images
This whole thing has been a nightmare. I’ve been struggling with feelings of despair and guilt. It’s one thing to lose an account which I’ve lovingly curated and built up over years. It holds a lot of memories. I’ve made some very dear friends on that account, and it’s how I’ve maintained many relationships as I’ve moved continents.
But it’s quite another thing to have a malicious entity use your face and name to steal other people’s information. The thought of that really breaks my heart.
I’ve been encouraging everyone to please report the account. This past week, it’s become clearer and clearer to me that the likelihood of me reclaiming that account is very low. The hacker really did a number on me, and the revision of my username basically invalidates any backup security codes I had.
But I’m hoping that if enough people report the account, Instagram will take it down. The fact that it exists right now, using my identity in malicious ways, is monstrous and offensive to me. I just want it gone.
In the meantime, I’m processing the loss of this.
As a tool for connecting to people, I really really valued Instagram. My daily habits included posting to Stories (a lot of dog videos, hellos and check-ins with whatever I was currently drawing.) I used it to help motivate my work. And while I can work without it, I miss having that feedback.
It’s going to be a slog building everything back up.
Ce’st la vie. Aside from being more careful with security, I’m looking at this as a reminder to not get so attached to one platform. I’m happy I still have this blog, my YouTube channel, Twitter and heck, even my Facebook account. At least I still have some of my network of family and friends on there.
For the time being, I’m going to keep trying to get the account back.
At this point, it’s just a repetitive circle of trying to get Instagram’s automated security to validate my identity. I’m told some people managed to get back in after weeks and months, so even in this dire apocalypse, hope springs eternal.