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HACKED + HIJACKED! |
So this happened.
About a week ago, I woke up to a dozen or more messages
on my phone telling me, in essence, that my Instagram account had been hacked.
Apparently, after I went to bed the night before, my
account had been taken over by an unknown person who proceeded to upload photos
in my name. It was horrifying to see strange photographs of advertisements for
handphone covers in an unknown language on my Instagram feed. In just one
night, I had lost my Instagram identity which I had painstakingly curated. Friends who use three or more different apps to edit a photo before posting, you know what I mean right?
I couldn’t control what was being uploaded because the
account had been compromised. The user settings had been tampered with such
that others could see my feed, but I was logged out of my own account.
I tried everything I knew, changing the log-in details,
reporting that I had forgotten my password, and reporting the user to Instagram
itself. In the meantime, more and more people were alerting me about the
situation, flooding my phone with screenshots of my hijacked account, making me
even more anxious.
Then the ever-phlegmatic J.G. asked me a question that stopped me in
my tracks. “What are you so anxious about? It’s only an Instagram account,” he
said.
I had no answer.
Frustrated as I was, I couldn't tell him why I was being so fretful about the whole affair. After all, humblet was happily sleeping in the next room. We had our home and our jobs. My loss was not spectacular in the material sense. So why all the fuss?