In January this year, I was the victim of what seems to have been some kind of data breach.
At first, I noticed lots of random login attempts from different countries. Then, I received alerts from my bank saying that flights had been purchased. It appears that a hacker gained access to my Outlook account. When I logged in, I found a pinned email claiming that they had hacked me, showing my password and claiming to have accessed my webcam. They threatened to share compromising content with my family and friends unless I paid them. Of course, nothing came of these threats.
I secured my account, and the window of opportunity the attacker had was very small. I cannot be certain, but I think they had access for around 30 minutes to an hour. During that time, I noticed that the following accounts had been reset or accessed:
Sony
Agoda
Discord
Netflix
Disney
Epic Games
TikTok
Depop
Twitter
On most of these accounts, nothing seemed any different. However, on Discord, Nitro purchases were attempted repeatedly, and all my chats were closed.
After a day or two, I managed to regain control of all my accounts. However, a few days later, I also noticed that OneDrive, where I normally store my holiday pictures, had been syncing many pictures from my iPhone’s camera roll without me realising it.
I had a quick look through the pictures, but I wasn’t examining them particularly carefully at the time. From what I remember, they seemed to consist of random camera-roll pictures, generic pornographic images and perhaps a few pictures of some of my crushes. As far as I know, there was nothing particularly embarrassing, although I cannot be completely certain because I wasn’t looking carefully enough.
Since then, I have worried that there might have been something I missed. I’m sure there is a reasonable chance that my iPhone camera roll contained some potentially compromising pictures. Despite this, there were no signs of anything being touched, and everything has seemed fine for around 10 months. Nothing suspicious has happened since. If there were any compromising pictures, they would have been mixed in with approximately 5,000 other pictures and files. Someone would have had to deliberately dig through thousands of pictures to find anything potentially compromising. My initial fear was that my pictures might be shared. I thought that, as the months passed without anything happening, I would become less worried. However, I still worry that copies of some pictures might exist somewhere and that something bad could happen to me one day. Everyone I speak to tells me that this fear is completely irrational. They say these attacks are highly automated and that it is extremely unlikely that someone would spend time digging through thousands of random pictures, save anything compromising, and then do absolutely nothing meaningful with it for months.I am still scared that copies of my pictures might exist somewhere and that I could face consequences in the future.
Is this fear irrational? What do people think about my situation?
