Friday was a casual day at my home office. After closing down the futures trading for the day, I visited a few websites where time can quickly be lost. After Facebook, I tried to make a stop at LinkedIn. Hmmm…I couldn’t login. I must have missed a password change. Let’s try this again… When I attempted to go directly to my “page,” the display was all jumbled and barely recognizable. The fear grew.

After a few attempts, it became clear my account was no longer mine. When I wanted to get the code sent to my phone number, the default phone number was not mine. (They made no effort to change the default email.) After finding the LinkedIn page to report hacks, I immediately completed it. But, because I couldn’t log into my account, I had no way of tracking the followup emails within LinkedIn. I was able to complete the “Persona” link and upload my driver’s license. (This didn’t seem to work so well. The issue was almost immediately resolved when I uploaded my passport a few hours later.)

First, I had to figure out what allowed this to happen. There were indeed a couple of emails in my Yahoo! account. Within a 6 minute period, a new password had been requested and 2-step verification had been turned on. (The IP location of the computer accessing my LinkedIn account was in India. The emails were forwarded to my Google account, but they went to Spam.) Clearly my Yahoo! account had been hacked, or even worse, my computer was compromised. Knowing there was a hack led me to a very dark place. What is the worst account I had that could be hacked?

As I waited for LinkedIn to let me back in, I went to every place I login where I can access my money. (e.g. investment, retirement and bank accounts) I changed the password, and if two-step verification was not turned on (fortunately I only had to do this for one of my wife’s accounts), it was turned on. I went to credit card account and any other place where mischief could take place. (GoDaddy and my domain names as an example.)

While I was working on changing passwords with my shaking fingers, my Norton scan of my laptop displayed an error. Could there be a virus on my system that was capturing the keystrokes of every place I went? Could the LinkedIn hack been a move to put me into “fear-mode”? Were all of my critical sites now on the radar of my hacker? After taking a few deep breaths, I closed some programs on my computer. I hoped the error was because their was a memory issue. I restarted the Norton scan.

Over the next 2+ hours, I could barely relax. I kept watching the Norton display as the files were scanned. Once 1M was passed, I thought, “It can’t be much longer.” Then, it just kept going. Realizing Norton would not scan any faster with me glued to the screen, I attempted to accomplish other tasks. I peaked at the screen every chance I could. Once Norton had scanned over 2M files, I was convinced the hacking virus was somehow outsmarting or colluding with the Norton software. Finally, the scan was completed. All was clean. All gathered information pointed to my failure to turn on “2-step verification” at Yahoo! as the problem.

I realize this is not my normal post. It isn’t related to algorithmic trading at all…or is it? If you are a great trader but leave a backdoor into your account, you are engaging in risky trading behavior. I thought I was buttoned up pretty tight…until I wasn’t. The hacker may have been having fun, but his efforts weren’t wasted. If he would have added his email to my LinkedIn account, I would have sent him a “thank you.”