Who Should a Person Turn to If Hacking Suspected?

jakeny

Baseband Member
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What's up everyone,

I have a question regarding what to do if you suspect that you've been hacked on your personal computer?

Technical solutions + legal would be great.

First, should we wipe our computer? Like is there a way to just delete everything and start over again and, if so, would that still secure against a future attack from the same person(s)?

What's the best thing to do technically?

The other thing is, should we contact the authorities? Or, would it first be better to go to a computer consultant of some kind first? I wouldn't know where to begin. Do they have computer specialists, who can check your computer for signs of malicious hacking? If so, what's the best way to find a person/company that is reputable? And what about going to police, etc.?

Appreciate everyone's advice as always!
 
This would depend on whether or not important, sensitive or business information has been stolen. Whether you are seeing money being withdrawn from your bank accounts etc. If that is happening then it would be a criminal matter and for the police to deal with. If it is just a suspected hack then, personally, I would back up all my personal files, wipe my computer use a cleaner program like Ccleaner (there are others) using the "wipe the whole disk and 7 pass option. This will wipe your drive and and clean all the space 7 times. You will be left with a blank formatted disk. Then I would reinstall all my operating systems and all the programs, finally putting all my personal files back on. Then I would go through all my passwords and change them. then I'm afraid it's a matter of seeing if you have cleared that hack or not. If not you have to do it all again.

That is the way I would do it but I am able to do that. I do not know how capable you are with reinstalltion of media. Also a full wipe and 7 passes of a hard disk with Ccleaner could take days. It could well be easier and cheaper to save your personal files destroy and chuck the old hard drive and start again.. There will be slightly faster ways to this I would think but the way I have described is, possibly, the cheapest. I'm not sure I would trust any other computer tech to do a thorough job and it would be very expensive for them to do what I have described.

I have already described the circumstances as to when I would go to the police. Hacking is illegal but you would need proof etc etc I also do not think the police would be that interested to be honest but that is just my, cynical, view.
 
Did you manage to solve this? I agree with Pete but 7 passes may be over kill. Unless your a high profile guy with a lot to lose.

The authorities cannot really do anything unless you are certain who the person is.

A lot of people take an IP address to the police and think they will catch the hacker. Unfortunately they couldn't be further from the truth, all hackers run through vpns/proxy and thus it's not there real IP anyway.

If you have money missing from your accounts then notify your bank.

If you receive any letters for unpaid items, call the companies.


Sent from my HTC One M9 using Tapatalk
 
I think the best thing you can do is after you re-install your operating system and all the programs, and have it set up the way you like. I would use a program called Macrium Reflect and make a backup image of your operating system partition and save it to an external hard drive.

Then, if anything should happen and your operating system gets messed up. You could restore your computer back to the way it was when you made the image.

When you run the program for the 1st time it will ask you to make a Rescue CD, click yes and burn it to a CD.

Hope that helps.
 
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