Getting Tagged and Hacked

A local artiste makes their mark on the fence in our front yard.

I knew it was coming.  Our neighborhood isn't bad, but it's most definitely urban and mixed use.  We live just a mile north of downtown San Jose.  There is a Liquor Store (spelled Kuik Mart on one side and Qwik Mart on the other) and a Salvation Army store up the street to the north.  There's a bus company and a pita bakery across the street.  Two blocks to the east is a Starbucks and a Jamba Juice - just across the street from our neighborhood gay bar.  Amidst all that commerce, there's also a house at the end of our block for sale for $899,000 (recently reduced from $949,000!).  It's definitely a diverse neighborhood.

The commuter train station near our house.

Homeless people are a regular fixture of the neighborhood - the boys like to boast that their school is the only one in San Jose with its own train station and hobos - and some of the locals are kind enough to leave empty shopping carts on our front lawn on a weekly basis.  Need an empty soda bottle or a worthless lottery ticket?  How about an empty coffee cup or an empty pack of cigarettes?  They're all free for the taking in the nearest gutter on a daily basis right on our street.  Everything you'd ever want or need right out your front door! 

So it wasn't really a surprise when I walked out of the house on a recent Sunday morning, headed out to the car, stopped and looked to my right, only to realize a little white fence on the corner of our front yard had been "tagged" with some graffiti overnight.  I didn't even feel that angry or violated, mostly just resigned.  If you live in any urban area in America like San Jose, the odds are at some point you're going to get tagged with some graffiti.

I'm blaming it on Banksy.  Every punk with a spray can is now an urban Picasso (if they only had any idea who Picasso was) thanks to Banksy and the documentary film (or was it?) Exit through the Gift Shop.  Netflix and Hulu are the gateway drugs to urban vandalism and street crime.

San Jose isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, a crime-ridden or lawless city.  Sure, we have plenty of your garden variety gang and drug activity, but the crime rate here is actually pretty low for a city of this size.  Still, I've lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and Dublin, Ireland, and this was the first time my residence has been tagged.  But I still knew it was coming.

We had the fence painted over and the graffiti has yet (fingers crossed) to reappear.

Then a couple of days later, one of my e-mail accounts was hacked.  You may remember the friendly e-mail you received from me informing you about the great online deals for Viagra from a pharmacy in the Great White North.  Or something like that.

I have no idea how it was done; I never check my e-mail on a public computer or give my password out to anyone, but I basically sat there and watched it happen.  I was on my laptop with my e-mail account open when all of these bad e-mail address notices started popping up in my "in box" - about 15 of them.  I took a look at one and immediately realized I had been hacked.

Quickly moving into my e-mail account settings, I changed my password from 6 characters (mixed letters and numbers) to more than 12 characters (mixed letters and numbers and mixed upper and lower case letters).  I would give you the password if I could, but it's now so long and convoluted that I have no idea what it is anymore.

After changing my e-mail password, I went through all my other online accounts just to make sure I didn't use that e-mail and the same password on anything else.  I didn't.  I changed and strengthened a few anyway, just for good measure.

But now I have so many different "handles" and "passwords" for all my various e-mail and online accounts that I can't remember anything anymore.  I'm so secure that half the time I have locked myself out of my own account.  Some young Russian teenage hacker can probably check my Netflix queue easier than I can.

I have noticed in the couple of weeks since it happened that several other friends of mine have also had their e-mail accounts hacked.  A few have made sheepish apologies on Facebook, but I don't think that's even necessary at this point.  If you haven't been hacked yet, it's just luck, and at some point it's coming.

When you live in San Jose and get hacked, the nice thing is that a few of your friends who really know a LOT about computers and servers and network security, etc. send you a little note letting you know what happened.  I had a little chat with one friend of ours who specializes in computer security (he was shocked it happened to a Mac user) and he basically said there isn't much you can do about it.  C'est la vie.

Welcome to America in the 21st Century.  In all those Sci-Fi books, films and TV shows of my youth that tried to predict life in the future, I don't recall Captain Kirk or Spock having to change their passwords after getting hacked.  You want Sci-Fi authenticity?  How about "Spock Sucks" painted in spray paint along the side of the Enterprise?  That's really where men are boldly going to go.  Where many have gone before, and many will go again.

(Post-Script:  After I finished and posted this piece this morning, I noticed this article in today's San Jose Mercury News, stating that graffiti/tagging is way up in San Jose and throughout California.)