Last night I went to bed fairly early. While I was in bed, I began to send a series of threaded tweets. In the midst of this, the thread essentially broke – this sometimes happens when you don’t respond to the last tweet properly or you accidentally respond to the wrong tweet. This meant I had to delete and repost the second half of the thread. In order to do this better, I decided to work from my desktop computer. I can’t recall if I’d left the computer on, or if I had to turn it on especially to fix my tweet thread, but I can tell exactly when I went to use the desktop by the time stamps in the thread. It was between 9:14 and 9:31 pm.
Around 10:30, I went to turn the computer off, but found it had already been turned off. I didn’t remember turning it off, and suspected it had been turned off by an outside source. This has happened before (computer being turned on or off by an outside source) though it doesn’t happen often. Just to ensure it was really off and not stalled in a sleep state, I unplugged the computer and plugged it back in, then went to sleep.
This morning I got up, turned the computer on, and began working. When I tried to log into Google at 7:17am however, I received a message saying my Google password had been changed ten hours earlier. Further investigation revealed that my Google password had been changed at 9:25pm on October 21 (last night) – this would have been almost exactly when I went to the computer to fix my tweet thread. I am quite certain that I didn’t do anything thing with Google at that time, and I certainly didn’t change my password. However, according to Google, the password was changed from my very own computer.
Not only that, but there were no notifications either in my email or text messages that the Google password had been changed. The only reason I knew it had been changed is because I had been logged out and thus received that message when trying to check my mail.
Speculating on what may have happened, it is possible that the tweet thread was deliberately interrupted in order to force me to go to the computer and turn it on or log in to fix the thread, and then that was used opportunistically to remotely access my google account. It is then further possible that the computer was turned off, I suspect by another watching entity, in order to protect further damage from happening overnight.
This is emblematic of what every day is like for me.
