Sunday, July 24, 2011

Capturing Our Keystrokes

Someone is trying to steal our money.  They're working on stealing our identity too. 

Yes, if you're listening to my keystrokes as I type, you, you scumbag, do not deserve my money.  You don't deserve to see the sun, to breathe clean air.  You deserve to coil around in a poisonous vat of self-hatred.

You are a leech, a worm.   How does it feel to be a parasite, loathed by everyone around you?

I just want to know - would your mother be proud of you? Do you have that inner glow that you are the person you were always meant to become? No?

Mike found evidence of phishing on our computer, keystroke capture.  That means that when we used the Internet, everything we typed went into a packet and was sent somewhere else.  Then, they decoded it for information they wanted, like credit card numbers and other supporting information.

It makes me think of the time I was forced to share an office with a man who listened in on my conversations and read my journals.  I finally called him an asshole in my journal and immediately, his attitude changed dramatically.  I don't know if he stopped reading it, so I put some nasty comments about him in there once in a while.  He didn't talk to me much after that.  From then on, I was very careful about my private information while I was on the phone and I took my notebook with me everywhere except to the bathroom.  Why do people have to be like that?

Identity theft is a scary prospect.  This weekend, we checked our credit reports.  They looked okay.  Still, I've typed lots of personal data on my computer, feeling the false security of sitting in my quiet home as I work.  If you think in terms of keystroke capture, there is no other time when numerals add up to 16 except for a credit card.  Phone numbers are eleven digits. Social security numbers are nine.  Zip codes are five.  You'd think that the credit card companies could foil some of the thieves by varying the number of digits on credit cards.

These people captured two credit card numbers and part of our address.  We know about the credit cards because our credit card company is great.  They have created heuristics that 'guess' when our card is used for things we don't normally buy.  During a week that I ordered two shirts, shorts, pants and a pair of shoes, they froze my credit when what looked like another pair of shoes came through on my card. 

I called the card's 800 number and talked to a woman on the phone.  She went through details with me and we figured out that I was going to have to get a new credit card.  She was great and I told her how much I appreciated that their heuristics could catch this problem.  A week later, I got some orthotics in the mail, the result of the phishing.  They have part of our address.  Crap!  I almost sent the package back, but I decided not to.  What if that correction on our address had a way to get back to the parasites trying to piece together our data to steal more from us?

Then, Mike's card was frozen.  There were two charges that weren't ours.  One of the charges went through.  The people at the credit card company said that they had our address even though they didn't have the three digit code on the back of the card, so they let it go through.  Don't do us any more favors like that, if you don't mind.

So now, even though I think we've eliminated the phishing software on our computer, I'm never going to enter all of my information on the computer in order again. I don't like shopping, so I love using the Internet to buy things.  Why is it that someone has to come along and ruin that?

Thank you for listening, jb

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