Hello everyone, I’m not sure where to post this question so forgive me if I am in the wrong place; but I need some help. I’m a medically retired Military Police Officer that’s trying to just take things as easy as I possibly can from here on out but I’ve got a problem.
For over a year now I have been dealing with some strange issues involving my electronics such as my cell phone, computer, router, and anything that is connected to the internet. Now I know that there’s some people out there that claim that they are being hacked and in reality they have a virus, Trojan, or malware. I’m not saying that isn’t my case either. But I’ve got a little more going on that I need to get some clarification on.
I’ll try and make this straight to the point as I can. It seems to have started with getting locked out of my hotmail account over a year ago. I didn’t really think much about it because I hadn’t checked my email regularly for a while and when I got the message my password wasn’t correct I went ahead and reset it. But then the next time I went to login I got the same message. That’s the last time things were normal.
After finally getting back into my email (hotmail) account, I decided to make sure I wrote down my password and put it in my wallet. I thought maybe someone was trying to access my email and they were just locking me out after too many failed login attempts. But the next time I tried logging in I got a more serious message and I had to verify my identity before getting access to my account.
Well needless to say I kept getting locked out time and again. So much so that I took my fiancé’s advice and opened a Gmail account to remedy my problem. For a week or two this seemed to work so I pretty much forgot about the hotmail account problems. Then I started getting the same problem with the Gmail account. Except this time I couldn’t get into my account without additional verification and for some reason the account didn’t have my phone number saved and I distinctly remember saving it. So I tried calling Google to get access because I was about to start some online classes. I never could get through so I had to create another new Gmail account. This time I immediately filled out everything and made sure it was saved and turned on 2 way authentication and included my fiancé and dad as my backup verification methods.
Things returned to normal afterwards and I again didn’t pay much attention till a couple months later when I got a new computer. I bought a HP workstation that was on sale from Amazon and came with Microsoft Office which I needed for school. After setting it up for the first time, I noticed that it was a little bit different than my previous computer but only because it was saying my network was a Workgroup instead of a Homegroup. I didn’t think much about it though at the time. I installed Norton 360 and purchased the VPN protection after a friend advised me to be cautious. The next day I started up my computer and noticed it took almost 10 minutes to load after it was updating drivers. Once it finally finished I logged in and immediately didn’t see the Norton or the VPN anywhere. I reinstalled both after and started my homework assignment. But once I was ready to save my work. I kept getting denied permission to save it. I just received a message to notify my system administrator if I needed to be authorized to save my work in a file. Now this is when I started getting concerned. I checked my profile and it said I was the administrator. But I couldn’t save a file to anywhere on my computer. So I saved it to a usb flash drive for the time being.
I asked my fiancé if she was able to save anything from her login account and she logged in immediately and saved a test message. So I had her log off and rebooted the computer. Again I had to wait for drivers to update another 5-10 minutes and after I still wasn’t able to save anything. I reverified my account was administrator and started trying to look up what was the problem. I didn’t even notice that the VPN and Norton were not activating again. When I did notice, I couldn’t get Norton to start up and the VPN kept giving me an error message halfway through installing it again. Needless to say I never got them back on the computer after that day.
Fast forward a month and things were only getting worse any time I logged on to the computer. I’d have to wait 5-10 minutes for PCIE and Graphics drivers to update along with NT. After I finally got on I logged in to my Gmail account and noticed that the layout was different and that I didn’t seem to have as many folders and I didn’t see any of my messages that had been previously opened. The only way I could find them was to do a search for it and hope I got lucky. You see, it just kind of started snowballing. And what was worse, it was only happening to me and not a single issue with my fiancé. The computer never needed it’s drivers updated when she logged in and she was able to save anything with just the basic profile permissions.
Because of all the strange stuff that kept coming up I tried taking pictures or screenshots if something looked out of place. Then my iPhone memory filled up and started showing the system apps were taking up 13-14 GB of storage on my phone. My photos all were somehow corrupted and couldn’t be opened. My router was the next problem I had. Not only was all the other issues happening to me; I then couldn’t login to the router to verify any settings. I was particularly curious about why I couldn’t seem to use the internet on my phone or download anything anymore because my service was so slow. Yet as usual my fiancé never saw any of these problems. I finally decided to replace the router and upgrade to a more secure and faster model. I checked with some friends that usually game on their network and made sure that QoS had my phone as priority but this didn’t help anything. Then by accident I was on my Amazon Prime Account shopping and accidentally clicked on AWS at the bottom of the screen. I found out that my Prime account now also had AWS attached to it without my knowledge. I verified it wasn’t a mistake after calling Amazon and was assured that they would remove the access. So I started trying to find out more information on what AWS was but for some reason I couldn’t find any search results for AWS at all. Zero! That’s when I noticed a bunch of extra stuff inside the browser that I had never noticed till then. Normally after I had typed in my search I would get some results from whatever I was looking for and it would look like what+is+AWS?= and then a result. But now after the ? I had a bunch of what I later found out was code that seemed to go on forever. After copying and pasting enough searches I learned about Open Source and started finding GitHub and StackExchange in my phone and computers browsing history. My fiancé said that she had no clue what or how it got there.
Ok now we are almost done. Just recently I decided to check back into my hotmail account that I was locked out of before this all started. And guess what I got right in with the password I had been trying to use and was denied. What I saw was that someone had been using my account and now it wasn’t just a hotmail account. It’s a MSN Account that’s got access to something called Azure and apparently I’m a developer. So I checked my other Gmail account and it let me login fine too. But it’s now got something called Firebase and Cloud attached to it. It’s also listed as a developer account for me. I contacted both MSN and Google and was told that they would be closed within the week but I have kept checking on them and they still haven’t been deactivated, nor was AWS removed from my Amazon account.
At first I thought I had gotten a virus or something that was just gaining permission escalation but now after finding the additional services to my accounts I am leaning towards I’ve been hacked. The strangest thing is that it’s starting to all point towards my ex fiancé. By this I mean there’s a lot of stuff that’s really too coincidental to overlook. During all of this she had been trying to mess around on me and whenever I would question about her whereabouts all of a sudden my stuff wouldn’t work so I’d deal with that. I also found out that she rooted her last phone and her tablet. Only thing is that I don’t believe she could be doing this alone. I mean because she actually was arrested for Dow and ended up serving 2 weeks rather than paying her fine. And during that time I went and bought a new computer after the last one kept crashing it’s hard drive. I also replaced the router and modem and had them setup by Best Buy in my home so I couldn’t make a mistake and leave an open port or something. I even got a new cell phone and created a new email account so that if somehow this was happening and related to my accounts then it wouldn’t be connected. But here it is. My brand new Asus RT AC3100 router can’t keep the security software on it that it came with nor the VPN that also was included. It also keeps changing it’s settings from what I select. I have it set for no UPnP, no remote, no FTP or Saamba. I looked yesterday and found out that somehow it registered itself at 4 o’clock in the morning and set up a ddns Account through Asus. I’m really at my wits end with everything. Just as soon as I think I’ve found something that will explain how someone basically has Parental Controls over all my stuff, something different happens and I have to see what is going on with it. Last question I have is; yesterday I noticed my iPhone had made reference to “mdm” as in mobile device management and said that it was actively running in the background. Could that happen where I had it installed on my devices and didn’t realize it was on there? Seriously any advice besides going off the grid would be appreciated.
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