Bad blog going around

A friend of mine, we'll call him "Jim," recently sent me the following direct message on Twitter: "Bad blog going around about you, heard or seen it yet?  airtar(dot)ru."  Jim's a pretty media savvy kind of guy and I'm a totally paranoid kind of gal, so naturally I clicked on the link. The site was shut down and immediately I realized my mistake was two-fold: Jim had been hacked and I was an idiot.
Though I have to admire the cleverness of the hackers, or phishers, as I later found out they were after doing a Twitter search. It makes me wonder how many people out there are like me, willing to believe someone wrote a bad blog about them. Maybe it's because I'm a blogger and all, I thought a reader might have taken issue with me or something I said and instead of sending me an email or just writing a hateful comment on my site, they wrote an entire hateful blog. This bad blog idea appeals to my vanity, the fact I would actually believe someone would spend the time to write an entire blog about me, bad or otherwise.

I quickly sent Jim an email, asking if he'd been hacked. He called me back just as quickly, perhaps more interested in my husband's technical expertise than commiserating. "Change your password," was Jeff's sage advice. It was mine, too, you know, just for the record.

Searching on Twitter I discovered a lot of chatter about the bad blog hack and a lot of people saying idiots like me who are stupid enough to click on such links deserve to be hacked. Maybe we do. Yet after all this, do I dare admit I'm relieved nobody wrote anything bad about me, an exposé, true or false, about skeletons in my closet or maybe even just that time I had one too many margarita's back in college? Of course I admit it. I even wrote a bad blog about it.

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