Hacked – Jenny 46

[For back story go here: Story so far at 30 Nov 2020 and this one.]

[For other back story click in-links] 

Sat on a kitchen stool, hoping the nerves would subside, Helen was waiting for Jenny to come back in with the A4 printout of the list of demands. Everything had been too good to be true, but there again why should she have to think like that? In the middle of a pandemic and with the world still gone to pot, albeit with a few bright clouds appearing every now and then, couldn’t they just have one nice thing? Why did someone alway save to spoil everything?

This was the story of her life so far, thought Helen. Whenever she got something good, something rubbish came along either straight afterwards or revealed itself on the flip-side. Tickets to fantastic gigs, only to be refused admittance for not looking old enough. Fabulous looking apps that then continuously dumped her as soon as things looked interesting. Books which took her days to read before completely letting her down with boring predictable endings. Books she’d loved, only to have some rubbish teacher or school mate destroy it for her by criticising a specific scene and ruining the magic. Tickets to fantastic gigs where she was let in, only to find herself behind a pillar.

The list went on. But none of them made her feel quite as bad as this.

Jenny put the list in front of Helen and drew up the stool next to her. “Biscuit?” she asked.

“Do we not have any chocolate left?” asked Helen.

“After the past few months any chocolate entering this house effectively vaporises before it gets to the cupboard,” said Jenny. “Never mind living with three other people you’re living with Izzy. No chocolate gets past her. Actually that said…”

She got up again and went across to where they kept the biscuits they hid from the kids.

“Oh, right,” said Helen. “I see it all now.”

“If you tell Peter I’ll disown you,” said Jenny.

“Please don’t have a go at me,” said Helen.

“I don’t need to have a go at you,” said Jenny, deftly switching subjects, “You make it easy. Your password was the same as your user name. Shall I tell you again how safety minded that was not?”

‘Paint with mum’ had expanded to ‘Paint with the family’ quite quickly but the new direction was short lived. The foursome had managed to post five videos of them painting, spraying and making art before Helen realised something very serious was wrong. They could no longer post the videos online. Having eliminated everything from poor WiFi to bad file management, Jenny asked Helen to try logging on again. But Helen couldn’t log on again and a request to input a new password did not send an email to her address with an appropriate link. It appeared to have sent it to someone else’s.

Repeated attempts did not solve anything. Reboots, different devices, new interfaces – nothing would unlock the account. And then a couple of videos appeared that were decidedly unartistic in nature. One was just a black blank page which after 15 seconds was joined by a low, humourless laugh. That was it.

The second one just used the word “Hacked” repeated over and over again until the screen filled up. The same laugh was heard.

Humourless was right. This wasn’t funny.

Jenny scanned the printout in front of her.

“This guy’s done this before,” she said. “It’s almost like a standard letter.”

Their hacker said he would desist if they were given several mentions across their content every now and then – they seemed to be keen to advertise their IT services of all things – if they were given £300 worth of Bitcoins and ‘certain pictures’. Jenny wondered aloud which of their pictures created during ‘Paint with mum’ he was after, so Helen had to carefully hint that maybe those weren’t actually the ‘certain pictures’ he was after. Jenny wasn’t very keen on her special biscuits from then on and both of them lapsed into silence and sighs.

“Why don’t we just leave it?” said Jenny. “Set up another better account and do our thing there.”

“It’s the brand,” said Helen. “And the followers. We can’t really just give that up. And what’s he going to do next? He’s got access to our videos and I’m not certain what other information.”

“Can we end the account?” said Jenny. “Tell them it’s not us and..?”

“Easier said than done,” said Helen. “How do we authenticate ourselves if we can’t log on to authenticate ourselves?”

The following pause was ended by Jenny’s phone going off. It was Peter.

“I might have someone who can help,” he said. “A friend of a friend is working for a dating app thing and he’s a bit of a tech head. I’ll see what they can do.”

Jenny breathed half a sigh of relief. “Sounds good,” she sad. “But you know how I feel about you phoning me when we’re in the same house. You should come down here and talk to us, right?”