I received a contact submission yesterday that is rather interesting, one to which I have no intention of replying.

i am being professionally hacked by?????. the hacker accidentally sent me docs of the hack -if i understand them aol was a willing participant using aol /aim together

my phone is xxx-xxx-xxxxx
leave a message and i will call from anotherbphone [sic] -i am not a computer whiz-many bizare [sic] details-city and state -later-john

How very interesting.  I suspect this man found me by one or more of the AOL-related posts here, most likely one regarding an AOL hack that I wrote more than three years ago.

It’s a rather bizarre piece of work.  A hacker would not accidentally send anyone documentation of their activities.  If such a thing happened, the perpetrator is a script kiddie who can be stopped rather easily and arrested in short order.

As for AOL being a willing participant in a hack, they have certainly been so in the past, from employees selling account information to spammers to the MANY examples given in the previously linked article.

Even if I were interested in his story or otherwise advising him about this, do you really think I would blindly call his number and wait for him to call me back — from another number?  I don’t think so.

I suspect poor John will be waiting a long time for my phone call.  In the meantime, I’d suggest he contact AOL about his concerns, get a good antivirus and personal firewall for his PC, contact a local PC support company and have them do a security check of his computer, and definitely stop engaging total strangers on the internet with the idea that they will have his best interests in mind.  Consider the opportunity this could afford me to engage in nefarious activities with his PC and his life…