Message to a hacker

Dear Dirt bag,

To the person who hacked my email yesterday and my Facebook account today, there are no words strong enough for me to express my contempt for someone as unscrupulous as you.

Do you not have enough meaning and usefulness in your life that you can find gainful employment in a respectable occupation which benefits the general public or the business climate of the world?

Why do you operate in the shadows to prey upon those whom you must consider weak, worthless vermin incapable of feeling?

And, more puzzlingly, how do you profit from this activity?

Do you consider yourself a thief?

For the rest of my HONEST readers:

If nothing else, the last two days have been an education. No matter how careful you think you're being, a hacker can find a way to chop into your life and eat away at your fragile grip on that elusive world of online technology that we all love and hate!

It's embarrassing, to say the least.

You won't even know it's happening until a friend calls you and says, "Hey, I got a really strange request from you. What's going on? Have you been hacked?"

And the answer is--yes, yes, you have!

What an ugly word. It carries images of an ax murderer, chopping his victim into tiny bloody pieces, which he might then a) feed to his dogs, b) push down into the garbage disposal, or c) leave on the ground for the carrion crows to devour.

But I digress. (Let's not get sidetracked with visual images of what you would like to do to the aforementioned dirt bag sleezeball, Madeline...)

Yesterday, I changed my email password and then spent some time contacting my email contacts, telling them not to open any strange LINKS from me. (If they knew me well, they would have known that a link ending in foxnews.com was NOT from me...)

Today, a call from my sister across the state alerted me to the Facebook issue.

"Madeline! I just got a 'friend' request from you! I think you've been hacked!" she said.

Oh, my. I opened my Facebook page to discover more messages of the same tenor. Most importantly, my good blogger friend Ken Steinhoff issued me a copy of the new "fake Madeline profile," (as we've come to call it) and he gave me the address to go to in order to see it.

From that point, one of my oh-so-bright former Oran students messaged me with specific instruction on how to REPORT the hacker, so Facebook will (hopefully) take down his/her page!

I will share what I've learned, in case this happens to you:

1. Go to the fake page. I admit that I don't know how to do this. My friend Ken posted a blue link to the page. I think he went there, got the information, and shared it with me.

2. At the top of the fake page (which looked JUST LIKE MINE but without my comment that I had been hacked), there is a little round gear icon, under your cover pic and beside "message" and "friends."

3. Click on the gear. A drop-down menu will appear with several choices.

4. Choose "report/block."

5. Click "report."

6. Questions will follow, and you will check the answers.

7. At the end, click "report" again.

At this point, Facebook is supposed to take down the offending clone Facebook page.

I hope it works!!!

May God protect us from all those evil, unscrupulous scum bags who troll around the internet, searching for victims to hack up with their little machetes of destruction.

From the peaceful, innocent hills of Crowley's Ridge, this is your rural blogger, trying to find some peace for the rest of the weekend.