15 days of security

So you know you’ve been hacked.  Now what?  You can tell your passwords have been reset and you can’t get into your accounts.  You have evidence that a bank account has had funds transferred without your permission.  What can you do?

Well it honestly depends on exactly the level and damage of the attack.  Financial crimes have a higher impact and thus will often get action.  Low impact crimes, for example where someone is spoofing you online and pretending to be you in Facebook and asking for “friend” requests won’t get police action.

But what can you do to at least make authorities aware of the problem?  Obviously with any hacking or cyber activity that has a financial impact, immediately call your financial institution.  They can change bank account numbers, put in place positive pay processes to ensure that no authorized transactions get made without your explicit permission.   For high impact intrusions you can contact the FBI or the Secret Service or the Internet Crime Complaint Center.  For lesser impactful attacks you have much less options.

Often the best thing you can do is make sure passwords are changed and you run a full antivirus scan on your system with a third party antivirus program that you don’t normally use.  Using the antivirus from another vendor will often showcase other issues you weren’t aware of.  Many vendors provide full scan tools for free. or have rescue disks to help get your machine cleaned up.