I was attacked by a bot this week.\u00a0 Or maybe it was a Russian.\u00a0 His last name was Metzker, so who knows?\u00a0 That was the name he went by, but I doubt that\u2019s his real name.<\/p>\n
He began his missive by announcing, “I know your password is agatha.”\u00a0 Okay so, once upon a time, long, long ago, in a distant place and time, I signed up for AOL so I could stay in touch with my best friend from fourth grade.\u00a0 I was living in Washington state; she was living in Florida.\u00a0 Long distance calls weren\u2019t exactly affordable at the time, so an e-mail connection was our best bet.<\/p>\n
And, since I\u2019m a mystery writer, one whose role model happens to be Agatha Christie, choosing that for a password seemed like a no-brainer.\u00a0 And I could remember it.<\/p>\n
Please be aware that all this occurred in the mid-nineties, before people were recommending sixteen digit passwords with at least one capital letter, a number, and one of those oddball symbols marching across the top line of your keyboards.\u00a0 (By the way, when it\u2019s summer in Arizona or Texas and you want to tell someone how hot it is, why doesn\u2019t that keyboard carry a sign for degrees as in temperature.\u00a0 Maybe mine does, and I just haven\u2019t found it yet.)\u00a0 But I digress, let\u2019s get back to my favorite Russian.<\/p>\n
After explaining that he had my once-and-no-longer-extant password, Mr. Metzker went on to tell me that he had installed malware on my computer and knew which pornographic sites I had visited and that he had films of me from several of those.\u00a0 (Cue the music for FILM AT ELEVEN, because that\u2019s exactly what came next!)\u00a0 According to him, if I didn\u2019t immediately cough up $2700 or so in bitcoin, (Talk about a cheap date!) he would be releasing said films to my entire contact list!\u00a0 And that if I ignored his e-mail (Which I\u2019m not doing!) or reported him to the police (Why bother?) he would release the films anyway.<\/p>\n
All I can say is, go for it.\u00a0 Since I\u2019ve never visited or performed on a porno site in my life, I can\u2019t see how there would be any films from those kinds of sources.\u00a0 And even if there were, I can\u2019t imagine that the people in my contact list would find films of a 70-something year-old broad particularly \u2026 well \u2026 revealing.\u00a0 And if such films do happen to show up, I\u2019ll be utterly astonished.<\/p>\n
The following day, someone attempted to log onto my gmail account using the word Agatha.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t work.\u00a0 If he\u2019d tried Daphne, that wouldn\u2019t have worked, either, but I doubt this guy ever heard of either one of those terrific mystery writers.<\/p>\n
So there you have it.\u00a0 Another item from my writerly life, but I have a feeling that a dead Internet troll is likely to turn up in one of my upcoming books.<\/p>\n
After all, turnabout is fair play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was attacked by a bot this week.\u00a0 Or maybe it was a Russian.\u00a0 His last name was Metzker, so who knows?\u00a0 That was the name he went by, but I doubt that\u2019s his real name. He began his missive by announcing, “I know your password is agatha.”\u00a0 Okay so, once upon a time, long, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-qD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1652,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1651\/revisions\/1652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}