Hackers, Firewalls and Scorched Earth

I've been hacked! This is my story of how I lost my Instagram account and tips about how to navigate social media society.

Warning: this is partially a rant with possible strong language

As a part of my mission to bring a legacy of resilience through movement, each month you can join me for a hike on the bike trail followed by a free trauma informed vinyasa class back at the studio on Main Street. Go to savagegracecoaching.com to see the calendar and join my newsletter, Yoga Life on Main Street, to stay up to date on all the latest studio news, events and gossip. And now… on to this week’s episode.

It’s time to stop working out and start working IN. You found the Work IN podcast for fit-preneurs and their health conscious clients. This podcast is for resilient wellness professionals who want to expand their professional credibility, shake off stress and thrive in a burnout-proof career with conversations on the fitness industry, movement, nutrition, sleep, mindset, nervous system health, yoga, business and so much more.

I’m your host Ericka Thomas. I'm a resilience coach and fit-preneur offering an authentic, actionable realistic approach to personal and professional balance for coaches in any format.

The Work IN is brought to you by savage grace coaching, bringing resilience through movement, action and accountability. Private sessions, small groups and corporate presentations are open now. Visit savagegracecoaching.com to schedule a call and get all the details.

Website & free guide
Follow me on Instagram
Follow me on Facebook
Follow me on Linked IN

Transcript

Transcript

Ericka Thomas  0:04  

Hi there, everyone and welcome back to The Work In I'm your host Ericka. 

Listen, we are going to just jump right in to today's episode because something happened last week that I want to stay on top of. And that is that my Instagram account Savagegracecoaching was hacked last Tuesday. And I wanted to talk about this today for a couple of reasons. First of all to let all of you know that any variation of savagegracecoaching with any amount of dots or dashes before or after savagegracecoaching is a hacker. Please do not accept any texts or messages or business opportunities or cryptocurrency anything like that. There is no contest for an ambassadorship. There is no Mercedes that anyone has won. And I want to be very, very clear about that. First of all, I would never post anything like that. And I was actually just sick about it.

 Now I wanted to share this story about what happened with this hack. Because a lot of us do a lot of our business online and we feel like it's necessary to engage with the people that we are connected to in our social media communities and there's a lot of advice that we get out there about building, community building followers, staying engaged with them. And the idea is that we want a lot of engagement on social media. We're going to talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But the underlying idea here is that somehow social media is the one and only community square. This is the public square that we have to do business in and it isn't necessarily true. So let me tell you exactly what happened. With my Instagram account and just hopefully this will be a lesson for you.

And some encouragement for you also to know that just because just because you've never been hacked or you've not been hacked, doesn't mean it couldn't happen to you because I was one of those people. I was one of those people that heard about other's accounts and seen them being hacked on Instagram and Facebook and all different other social media platforms. I watched that happen to other people and I of course was you know, sorry. You know, I express the same things that I've heard over and over again for the last few days. I'm so sorry that happened. I'm going to report I'm going to unfollow I'm going to block all of these things that I've asked all of my friends to do. I have said those same things to others as well. And in the back of my mind, I always had this little bit of ego saying well, that could never happen to me because I am social media savvy. I've got a little bit of cybersecurity. And two factor authentication and all of these things. Well, guess what, folks? That stuff only works if you can filter out your trained niceness and Stay on your game 24/7 What happened to me was that I received a message maybe one that you received from me about a from one of my one of my community, one of my friends, someone who I know actually I've been a guest on his podcast. 

I received a message from him about this contest with no link or anything like that. And I really I ignored it because most of the time. I mean, he doesn't message me on a regular basis. I knew that was sort of hinky and sort of shady but then I got a message from him that said, Can you help me? And honestly to me that just pushes buttons. I am a helper. That's why I do the things that I do. And part of me was like, Well, you know, maybe you should try to help this person. What I did not realize was that I had been receiving several notifications from my social media account. That was telling me that someone was you know, trying to access my account or change the password or whatever it was, but that particular email that I had the two factor authentication on was I had notifications turned off because I like to kind of keep my workday clean. So I wasn't getting them in real time. And then the other piece is that I did not trust my gut. So my gut was telling me that this seems shady. This doesn't seem right. And it was late. I was tired. And I just I just fell for it. There isn't really any other.

Any other excuse? Like I don't have an excuse. I don't I was a little bit tricked. And then I did the rest of the tricking to myself and I'm gonna be really, really honest about that. I don't think I'm alone here because that other guy got tricked, too. So I was hacked from another hacked account from someone that I knew someone that I have a lot of respect for. And that you know, on some level I trusted because I had met and I had had a relationship, some sort of outside of Instagram relationship with so needless to say, what has happened has happened. And I was able to recover my original Instagram account, the one that is connected to Facebook so I have cut that person off but he still has savagegracecoaching  In some variation. 

My original account will look like zero followers, zero posts, zero following zero people right now, if you find it so I changed that name to realsavagegrace. Don't jump on there to follow or check it out. I have not yet decided if I'm coming back to Instagram. And I want to go into that a little bit with you all here.

 I have never felt very safe on Instagram. And to be honest, prior to three years ago, I didn't even know what Instagram was. But because I was diving into online business. That was one of the first things that was encouraged was to get on Instagram to start posting I even took an entire course on how to get comfortable posting on Instagram because I wasn't for months and months and months. I wasn't comfortable at all posting there sharing anything about myself there. I was not comfortable with that but I forced the issue. And when I think about it, it isn't really all that safe of a place. But I convinced myself that if I was going to be an online wellness entrepreneur, that I needed a presence on Instagram, even though hardly any of my people, the people that I've worked with in the past the people that I wanted to work with, none of them are on Instagram, it literally made no sense. So I'm I know you're listening to me talk and you're like that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. And I'm saying it and thinking to myself, that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. We are in couraged to find an authentic voice when we present ourselves on social media and I'm telling you that that is almost impossible if we are trying to work within this illusion of safety and security because it is an illusion.

Safety in general, is an illusion. Security is an  illusion. And I say that very often in the real world and people just cringe. We all want to feel safe. But when you come up against some kind of violation, any kind of violation like a hacker stealing your entire Instagram content library for the last three years, that was three years of content that was stolen from me. That is a violation. It's a surface violation. If I pull back a little bit or withdraw from the anger and the irritation, the frustration of dealing with this, I can look at it and say this is really just scratching the surface of who you are. And I truly believe that that content I have I still have it. It's backed up. I can do this again. Basically this hacker may have done me a favor and wipe the slate clean. So I could repost and move through this social media society with more strategy. Whether or not I'll do that, I don't know. But the result of all of these days and days of this roller coaster of fear and emotional dysregulation, it really kind of brought up for me. What a poke to the bear is what I sometimes call it that hit to your nervous system really feels like because we don't always live in this highly activated state right so when it hits you with some sort of event that feels terrible when that hits your life. It feels like the whole world is crumbling down. 

So how that showed up for me is in a few different ways that I want to share with you because maybe you can see some of these. These these things come up for yourself in other other situations. Right. All of them are a protective response from the nervous system even though you don't feel protected by them. They are a message from your nervous system that says you need to do something change something about what is going on here so that we can be safe. That's basically what these things are. So for me it showed up with a lot of agitation. I couldn't I couldn't hold still I couldn't sit down. In fact, even doing this podcast right now even recording this podcast right now. is difficult. It's difficult for me to sit and do this. I would rather be pacing around the room moving in some way. In fact, I was so agitated the second day that I took myself for a three mile run. That might not sound like a big deal but I haven't run since 2016. So that should tell you a lot that I was willing to just move that hard that quickly in response to this. Another way it showed up for me is this real bizarre lack of concentration like I cannot focus on one thing for any length of time. In fact, I've been bouncing back and forth between two different desks. Wandering from room to room I just have zero focus. It's it's a interesting variation on being stuck or paralyzed or frozen where you cannot it's not that you don't know what to do. It's that you can't pick one thing to do. You can't make a decision. That's this. That's another way that the body you know, freezes in response to something. Another another way that I've noticed in the past couple of days is this frantic procrastination. So rather than trying to focus again on how can I recover this account, how can I get my content back and diving into another hour or two? wrestling with the help documents through Instagram is this frantic procrastination like instead I'm gonna go organize my sock drawer like that would never crossed my mind on a normal day. But it has been an incredible roller coaster. And there are moments where I just want to burst into tears and moments when I want to tear my hair out and scream. But I think there's some more productive ways to move through this. This moment in mycareer. 

So this podcast is actually one of those ways. To talk to you every time I tell the story as embarrassed as I was about it in the beginning. Now I'm just mad and I want to recruit as many people out there with this information with this. I don't know I just want you to be armed with it. I want you to be armed with the knowledge that yes, there are hackers out there they're gonna try to get you if you want to be on social media. Yes, you need to be savvy but no, no this understand this, that they don't ever give up. So you can't let your guard down about it. If you understand that, when you do let your guard down, cut yourself a little bit of slack because you are human. You are probably a good human. And I will just say this as an aside my grandfather, my dad, both of them have said to me that people are not inherently good. They are not inherently good. We have to be taught how to be good. And I didn't have a very big list of followers. On my account. But I am proud to say that most of them are really good people because I had some kind of outside of Instagram relationship with them. They are good people and what kills me about this is that now I have accidentally expose them to a really bad person. And that just really that is what guts me to think about. It's it's kind of like it's kind of like if you are living in your house one day and someone breaks in while you are at home and starts taking all of your stuff that you have collected. And when you call the police for help, they show up and help the robbers take all your stuff away. That's what this experience has felt like to me. There was absolutely zero support from Instagram, and the only, quote unquote offers of help I got were when I posted on my Facebook page from instant responses that I knew were other hackers offering to help me and I say that facetiously to help me recover my account in minutes. I swear to God I got like five or six instantaneously within seconds of posting not on Facebook. It's like they were waiting for it. The people who are supposedly running our public square, the social media public square, the ones who are supposedly keeping it safe are also the ones that leave the doors and the windows cracked open for people to get in. Those are the bad ones, those those bad people. And because we are all so good, we are good to each other and we want to be good to each other. We want to think the best of other people. It makes us vulnerable to that. It's really really sucks I'm telling you, but Instagram and social media in general has promoted this fallacy that I think it that really really needs to be debunked. There's there's a lot of fallacies on social media don't get me wrong. There's there's a lot of them we're going to touch a little bit on them. But when you do business when a lot of your business is online. I shouldn't say that I shouldn't let me back that up. Let me let me back away from that. If you teach or coach online as part of your business. There is this fallacy this idea that because you do those things online, that you have to have this regular social media presence in order to build your authority. That is not true. Unless you are treating people halfway around the world, or coaching people left right and center but they none of them live near you. You certainly do not need to have a regular social media presence. If your people are not on Instagram. Why would you work so hard to build your authority on Instagram?

Social media proclaims itself is like the public square. Facebook Instagram tick tock Pinterest. Yeah, a lot of people go there and hang out but it's not the public square. It's a public square, right? The Public Square is wherever you are making connections and relationships and engaging with human people, other people that you want to help. That is your public square. So you don't have to use Facebook or Instagram or Tiktok or you know, whatever the latest thing is Twitter. I I always forget about Twitter because honestly I find Twitter to be like a foul, foul place to be. In fact, when I watch people getting their news from Twitter, it's it's like their their doom scrolling, and you can even watch their energy level from the outside. It's you can have a be having a pretty nice day and then sit down and read through Twitter and like hate the world when you get off of it. It's such a waste of space, in my opinion. Anyway, back to what I was talking about. Okay, yeah, so we don't have to use social media as our public square. Is it fun? Yeah. Is it productive? It can be but it's not always. And what we've been kind of sucked into believing is that the more followers we have on our social media sites, the bigger our income that is absolutely untrue. It doesn't match at all. And so be careful careful where you put your efforts. We are being conditioned to believe that hackers and hacking of accounts are part of this new social and cultural landscape that we are living in and that everyone will get hacked at some point. And that doesn't sit right with me. It should really cause people off actually, the idea that we need to accept that this is just part of doing business online. I don't think so. I don't I don't think so. You know, I've heard over and over again, and I'm so grateful for all of my friends and connections that reached out to me this last week, to say that they're so sorry that that happened. And they are supporting me by blocking and unfollowing and reporting and reporting and reporting this dude. I love them for that. But, you know, the unspoken statement or question that comes after that is it sucks but what are you going to do about it? And I I call bullshit on that. Because here's here's the truth. Here's the thing. Are you seriously telling me that out of all the brilliance that has come out of Silicon Valley, there isn't one person who can figure out how to undo or retrieve a stolen account? Seriously. I just don't believe that. I don't I cannot let that sit on social media in general claims to promote safety on every single platform. And they do it with their terms and conditions and their misinformation. Warnings and fact checking banners, when in actuality, all they're doing is protecting their story. All those facts get checked when they don't fit the current fiction that that media platform is putting out there and it makes me absolutely crazy. So now no one is allowed to have any opinion or god forbid a different opinion because God you can't really fact check an opinion. But we can't do that. I have friends who've had their their personal and business accounts just stripped from them with no recourse restricting access, Shadow banning and flat out shutting down pages for any mysterious little, little thing that doesn't fit their fictitious version. of the facts, in effect, just trampled all over freedom of speech. I don't know why we are not all up in arms about it.

And they get away with it because unless you're spending 1000s of dollars on Facebook, or Instagram ads, you will never get access to a real person. Guess what people? We you and I are not the customers on social media. We should not expect customer service. We are the product. We add all of our followers, all of our networks and our communities that we bust our tail trying to build on social media. We are being bought and sold every second of every single day. That we are connected to those social media platforms every single day. Why would those companies care if one of our accounts was stolen or appropriated or impersonated? Why would they why would they care? That would be like if Amazon responded to each box that got dropped in its factory. That's There's no way that's gonna happen. No. effing way. Now as long as you understand that I'm you go into these social media platforms and this engagement with open eyes, more power to you. I had my eyes open to that I have known those things about social media for a long long time. It'll probably be fine. I was fine for three years. But as soon as something goes sideways, just know you're gonna be on your own. All you're going to hear is just crickets. So that leads me to wonder how important is it for us to be providing content for free to these social media platforms. We are the meat that they are serving the content that we pour our heart and soul into is what they make money on. Think about that. Think about it. So I've been thinking about these problems, these cognitive dissonance, things that are coming up in my head about social media. I have a lot of decisions to make as far as how I want to proceed with my brand, whether that's on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn, whatever. We all have those decisions to make. The good news is that we still have control of making those decisions for the most part. And I don't believe that there's ever really a problem that comes up where a solution doesn't also exist in the same space somewhere. You may not be able to see it right away, but it is there. And so I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. Think about it. How I'm going to proceed. But I do know that there are some other ways that we can make our social media engagements a little more intentional, a little bit more real, a little bit more comfortable. I don't want to say safe, because safe isn't true. So here's some things that I have just been mulling around in my head just marinating on these things maybe if you are curious about them, or if you want to discuss more we can maybe do that. I'd be happy to do that some more. If you like any of these. Let me know about them not through Instagram. Don't go through Instagram. If you want to contact me

about what's coming next in this particular podcast. Go to savage Grace coaching.com forward slash inquiry and you can schedule a free 30 minute consult a call or phone call. I would rather speak to you in person. And here is why we need to create true firewalls in our social media community, around our social media community. We need to present ourselves as a protected space a safe space for our people. Okay, so in order to create a true firewall, what we need is real relationships with our followers, not only cyber relationships, because as we know, especially on Instagram, you can create any name for yourself. Just make up a name. And the people that follow you on Instagram aren't necessarily real people. All right. So we need real relationships. First with our followers. How can we do that, though? How? Well maybe we vet our connections a little bit better. You don't have to accept friend requests from everyone. You can check them out. Right? You can check

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Ericka Thomas  0:02  

or maybe that is part of the solution. Maybe there is a way to verify a follower. Right? And that is something we should really think hard about. I'm not sure how to make these things happen. I'm just telling you, I think they need to happen. Okay? So, real relationship with your followers, maybe instead of just following them through Instagram, you follow them through an actual meeting or invite them after an actual meeting like I'm going to send you a text. I'm gonna send you a text with a link to my Instagram account, or my Facebook account. And then when I see you friend requests me or follow me, then we can connect, because I am looking at your face and I see that you're a real person. I like you. You like me? Let's get together. You know, like that. Second thing is to build some ferocity, ferocity, like ferociousness, ferocity in your voice, that no one else can replicate. That could be in a really clear message, a really clear tone, really clear boundaries around what it is that you do, what you offer, who you are. All of those things, but really make it ferocious so that there is no there's no question. If somebody gets some sort of weird shady message that is coming looks like it's coming from you but doesn't sound anything like you. You can know. You can know that. That is not you. They will know because they know you. And then this last piece I think is really important and I'm I'll be starting to craft this a little bit more and that is to post your personal cyber or social mission statement. Kind of your manifesto explaining to people what you do and don't do what you will talk about what you won't talk about what is okay to discuss what is not okay to discuss what you will never do with your social media account. So that they can be assured that this is a safe place to be and if ever you do get hacked and someone tries to sell cryptocurrency and and Mercedes on your site, then they know that that is totally not you. Because I know you hope you're working on those things going forward. Whether or not I come back to Instagram or not. But I want to talk to you today I want to finish our conversation today with this idea about visibility because you know, as entrepreneurs, even if you're an independent contractor, whether you work in wellness or whether you don't work in wellness or whether you're a regular person just engaging on social media, or with other human beings in your work in your corporate work life, whatever it is, we have a level of visibility, right. We have moved way beyond the phonebook. In this world, right there is a level of visibility and we we present ourselves in a certain way our brand whether we are business, entrepreneur or not. We do have a personal brand. And it's really important that we take some responsibility and control of that really kind of craft it. And as you're doing that, we can think about engaging in not just visibility for visibility sake, but strategic visibility. So if you are going to use social media, as a vehicle to promote yourself or your business, what it is that you offer the world or even just engage with friends, we want to have some kind of strategy. It's not just like a bunch of buckshot just randomly shot out into the world hoping that it hits something to bring in engagement for you. Or income for you or whatever. So what is it about social media that could work for you? What about it doesn't work for you? And then address those things. in ways that make sense, right? So if you get a lot of engagement from posting something personal, once a week,

then maybe that's all you need to do. Do you have to spend three, four or five hours a week or even a month planning out your social media and scheduling it out in advance and I will be the first to say I love my social media scheduler, it saves me a lot of time. Actually, it's it doesn't save me time but it does save space and real estate in my brain where I don't feel like I have to think something up all the time so I can do it all in one shot. kind of plan it out in advance, but those things are going to change because honestly the longer I talk about this the more excited I am about not being on Instagram, kind of a Scorched Earth approach. Like if somebody is going to hack my account and steal three years worth of content and try to use it for someone else. Why would I give them any more fodder? Right? Why not take it all away and that was part of my thinking behind asking my friends and connections to report and unfollow and block this guy because like I said earlier I did not have a really big community, but it's big enough where somebody could be affected by this. And if they all blocked him, then he can't do anything then that. Then that account hopefully will get flagged by Instagram even though it keeps changing the handle over and over again. Whatever. Listen, this has just been a nightmare. And I want it to stop being a nightmare right now. Like I'm done. I do not like feeling this way because there is absolutely nothing that I can physically do. The fact is, if this was a real person and they came at me, I can handle that. I can protect myself. I mean, what else is the point? What's the point of learning self defense, if the people who are attacking you stay in the virtual world, right? There's nothing there. There's no connection there. And honestly, what makes me feel a little bit better is that I picture this person as this pale faced soft socially awkward Nightcrawler that lives in his mother's basement or maybe in some kind of, I don't know some back alley shack in the Middle East or something like that. And I just have one thing to say to this person. And that's Karma is a bitch. And you're going to do whatever it is that you're going to do to these people. But I'm telling you, everything comes back around. And so I would just take care. That's all to you my beautiful listeners. My my beautiful friends. I just want to extend so much gratitude and love to and again, please please beware the way you engage on social media and trust your intuition. It will guide you if something seems shady. It is better to go with that. Then try to filter out those years of niceness training right? So leave that behind. And trust me Your friends are not going to think badly of you if you're protecting yourself and you double check with them before you click on anything. That's all I have to share with you today. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the work in and next week. We'll get back to some hopefully happier episodes. Take care everyone

Transcribed by https://otter.ai