It was a normal Tuesday morning. I was rubbing the sleep from my eyes and had just turned on the palm-sized, rectangular, technological black box I am obsessed with—more commonly known as my mobile phone—when I saw my friend's message: "Reet, did you get hacked?" Not something I expected to receive on a normal Tuesday morning.

"Hacked" seems like a word for people in their grey years who believe they should trust everyone asking for their details, or for people who download games from pirated sites. I don't fall into either category. I have a presence on a few social media platforms, and somehow, within a week, someone hacked every one of them.

Back to Tuesday morning. Someone had logged into my Instagram to share news about Elon Musk. Not that I have anything against Musk, but I like to promote my blog on my stories. I deleted it from everywhere, changed my password and whatnot. Gmail, meanwhile, was sending me a notification that someone was trying to log into my account. Hello—that someone was me! Where was your security when someone was actually trying to sign in? Sleeping, like me?

The next day, I had to protect my LinkedIn. Why anyone would want to hack into it is beyond me. I use it to post normal achievements, like, say, getting up at 6 am. 

Today I woke at the hour the sun was set to rise, and rising with the first beam gave me a next level of insight." Stuff like that, you know.

Then I worked through apps I hadn't opened in months, getting more annoyed with each one. But it stopped being just an annoyance when my bank messaged to say I was trying to send someone $300. I don't owe anyone $300, and even if I did, I wouldn't be paying them at 11:32 pm. Before I could process that, a second message arrived: a request to change the mobile number on my banking account.

Like any panicked young adult, I called my financial advisor slash my dad. He told me to calm down and ring the 24/7 helpline. Whoever was hacking me couldn't push the payment through without the code sitting in my messages, which was the only comforting sentence anyone said to me that week.

After doing some preliminary precautions, I lay in bed and stared out my window. The curtain was open. Was it always open? Did I really leave my curtain open every night? What if someone is out there? What obstacle would a tiny lock be for someone who wants to break in? What was the helpline number again? After hyperventilating for a while, I finally calmed down into a nightmarish sleep.

The next day, I went on a quest to save my account and learned the benefits of multi-factor authentication. The upside is that I have become extremely fast at changing passwords.

I figured out that my Gmail had been attacked because it sits at the root of everything else. I'd used the same password for that account I'd used to create it ages ago. I had really procrastinated to an extreme.

My suspicions were confirmed the next morning, when I received an email from the 'Blitz Editor' asking me to buy Apple Store gift vouchers for our volunteers. Everything about that email said "scam”, but I only caught it because I was at the peak of my paranoia. Also because I knew she would never draft anything that serious; she loves sending emojis. I blocked the account. By then, I had already locked them out of nearly everything else.

They went for my identity and my money, and what saved the last of it was that I had become too paranoid to be polite to a stranger. The scary part isn't that it happened to me; it's that it was so ordinary: a normal Tuesday, a normal morning, and crooks digitally posing as grandma while they are the evil wolf in disguise.

As we struggle to type long passwords and set up multi-factor authentication, I wonder whether tomorrow's thieves will be baffled by a plain physical lock and key. They are apparently more comfortable working from home, pulling strings remotely to gain passwords and account details.

Some things that helped me manage these passwords were to start writing them as sentences. Like, who believes we can remember long sentences with special characters, too? Next, I added some reminders to change some passwords every once in a while to keep things running smoothly. I really did ignore my Gmail password for so long, and it came back to bite me. I also turned off the auto-save password functionality and no longer blindly sign up to websites. This incident made me super conscious of my internet presence too. It looks like a version of me is online before I even meet someone in person. It’s not fun to realise this, and trust me, it can be food for thought if you want a sleepless night.

Even though nothing was harmed, it's never too early to protect your account, so sit down and change your passwords. It’s disgusting and annoying, yes. 

But not fun when you are forced to do it like me.

Reet is a final-year computer engineering student who spends equal time debugging code and analysing plot twists. With a love for mystery, science fiction, and all things storytelling, she enjoys turning her observations into engaging pieces that spark curiosity and conversation.