Turkey(s)

Let's see.  How mad am I?  On a scale of 1 to 10, one being mildly irritated, ten being in an enraged red haze...I would be around twenty, like the bomb in the photo above.

The alarm goes off this morning, I lay there for a few minutes before it goes off again and work through what I have to do today.  I've been really busy for the last few days, but today I plan to forge ahead with an idea I have for Week 8 of the 52s.  In my mind, I fiddle with details until the alarm wails, which is the cue for the boys to cuddle in for their puppy loves, then we all get up to start the day.

Clueless to what's ahead, I turn on the laptop, get the boys squared away, make my cuppa, and sit down to see what's been happening in the world since last night.

**BOOM**   ==Pow==   ##Banggggg## 

Feel the earth shake?  That would be me, exploding into a nuclear cloud of outrage.

My email inbox is overflowing with spam, plus returned undeliverable spam (the weird mailer-daemon thing), and guess what?  It was all supposedly sent by ME!  It honestly took me a few moments for the shock to wear off before I got the drift that my email had been hacked. 

After some digging, burrowing deeper into my system, I discovered the asshat who hacked me came from Turkey.  Seriously.  Turkey.  They got into my computer at 5:12am this morning.  Three hours have gone by.  Many of my email contacts are in Europe, which means they will have already opened the spam--the spam sent from my email address, in my name.

Immediately I change my passwords, then send a quick note to everyone, apologizing for this disgusting invasion of privacy.  I have now spent nearly the entire damned day going through all my accounts, changing passwords, information and any relevant details.

The funny thing is (and yeah, I'm really laughing...), I had every intention of changing the passwords on my blog, email and a couple other sites at the first of the year, but I kept putting it off.  It takes a lot of time and energy to come up with new words, go through all the hoops at each site, blah blah.  Well, this was a lesson learned, wasn't it?

While walking the boys this morning, stewing about this situation and all the computer work ahead of me when I get home, I suddenly remembered getting a couple of weird anonymous emails last week.  They were attached to two separate blog posts, but when I went to the posts, Anonymous wasn't listed.  I thought it was odd at the time, but just deleted the bizarre, made-no-sense comments and moved on.  I truly wish Blogger would come up with a way to block anonymous emails.  It's either-or with them, unfortunately.

Whatever.  My point here is this:  Somehow the frigging hacker came through my blog and wormed his/her evil slimy self into my email account.   I am forced to change the settings for my Comments, which I didn't want to do, so now there are hurdles involved in leaving one.  I'm sorry about that, but compared to nuclear brain meltdown and compromising my system?  I had no choice.

So thanks, you flaming turkey, for not only ruining my day, but screwing with my system.  I firmly believe that what goes around, comes around.  Hope that wheel hits you good and hard...