Cyberattack - Softcover

Muka

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1546251243 ISBN 13: 9781546251248

Verlag: AuthorHouse, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Its amazing how we go about our days and pay no mind to how the internet influences our moods and behaviors. This book is a depiction of how lethal and toxic the things we see on our screens can be to an individual. Book 1 of this series focuses on cyberspace as a new frontier, a place that connects us all with our screens, a grid system of millions and millions of networks where information is inserted and removed to affect an outcome. But is there a group of bad guys out there trying to invade our minds, or are we just so stimulated by the trends of technology that we will become our own enemy? Only time will tell.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Manson Mutumbas father worked in a cinema, so he grew up watching how movies were picked in relation to the moods of the community. At an early age, this sparked an interest in storytelling and scriptwriting as well as the fundamental aspects of the audience. He is currently a university arts student and a bit of a traveler.

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Cyberattack

By Muka

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2018 Muka
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5124-8

CHAPTER 1

My name is Muka. The past few years of my life have been very eventful, leaving a trail of lasting negative impressions of me with most people I met. I had way too many moments that led to a lot of burned bridges, broken relationships, and huge disappointments from friends and relatives. I have even been caught on the wrong side of the law. In a nutshell, I haven't been living up to acceptable standards of good behavior.

These past few years, I have been living in a foreign country, far from home and from anyone who truly knows me. I am going to tell you of one event that shook my world so badly it has taken me more than six months to make sense of it all and turn it into a coherent tale.

I can't honestly say when, how, why, or where all this began. But on November 29, 2016, I woke up just as I did every morning, with my radio tuned into a certain Christian radio station. Mornings have been so bad these past few years that it took the radio playing encouraging songs and sermons just to get me out of bed. But this was a particularly bad morning. A few days before, one of the most important women in my life had died. My grief grew into a huge hole of loss filled not only with her death but with those of all the other people I loved, including my parents and two younger siblings. Amid this cascade of sorrow, I also had to face the fact that I couldn't even attend her funeral because it was thousands of miles across the ocean. My bank account was at zero. I had debts with every loan shark in town, and to top it off, I had piles of mail from debt collectors all over the country.

For the twenty-seven years of my life, I had nothing to show except a bunch of excuses, bad decisions, and very bad drama. Every day of the past few years, I felt a growing disappointment with myself. But on this day, each thought of the bad decisions I made amplified my disappointment to a degree I never felt before. I told myself to pull it together. I comforted myself with the fact that my writing was gaining a healthy following on social media and the internet. I even created a Facebook page dedicated to community development. So I told myself there was hope I could turn things around. To reinforce this little hope, I turned to the one source that had offered me encouragement every morning for the past few years — the Christian radio station.

On air was a preacher I had listened to many times before. I suddenly realized he was talking about my Facebook page posts! It was very f lattering. A moment ago I felt very insignificant, and here was a renowned pastor talking about my posts on a radio station thousands were tuned into.

This moment was short-lived. I was someone who once knew God, he continued, but turned away from the path. This preacher even broke down one of my posts line by line, talking about how my writing style was a scheme to attract followers and was sinful and rebellious to God. I found myself believing his words. My messed-up life was evidence of their truth. He went on talking until my mind became clouded and taken over by my earlier feelings of disappointment. I was convinced I was a big disappointment to my friends, to my relatives, to society, and now even to God.

I sat down, so overcome by guilt and shame that I felt the need to be exorcised or something. How did the preacher or the show's producers even know of my existence? Then I remembered the time I got in touch with one of the DJs at the station to show my appreciation for the work they were doing. They must have looked me up on Facebook and found that I was admin for a page with quite a decent following. But why wouldn't this pastor just approach me to talk about my posts? I wondered if I was too bad to even reach out to. He had to make a radio program to dent my work.

After a while, I pulled it together. I reasoned that he is a man and entitled to his opinion, and opinions are not facts. But it was still very discouraging that one of the people I looked to for inspiration was now attacking me. Once again, self-doubt was brewing in my mind. Instead of fortifying me with hope that morning, the radio program had ended up eroding the little I had. I was back to zero. My mind consumed with memories of bad decisions and negativity.

And that was how my morning started. I jumped out of bed and walked to the living room. I lived on the second floor of a two-story townhouse. It was time to check on my social media activity and how my page was doing. I sat on the couch to use the computer, which was connected to the plasma TV. I quickly logged into my account, and what I found did nothing to restore calm to my state of mind.

It appeared all my Facebook friends in a fifty-mile radius of my address woke up to write insulting posts about me on Facebook. My newsfeed from top to bottom was filled with offensive posts all targeted at me. It was like they all called one another and agreed to do this that morning. The shock made me question my senses. I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. It was unbelievably weird that one of the top preachers gave a sermon about me and that now all this stuff was in my newsfeed from people I needed support from.

I immediately emailed one of my pastor friends and told her something weird was going on. I told her I wasn't exactly sure what it was, but I thought I was seeing and hearing things that couldn't be real. She told me to stay put, and she would come see me as soon as possible.

The insults were too much and very personal. I felt my privacy had been violated on the most extreme levels. I didn't want to look anymore. Feelings of being a reject flooded my mind like water over a dam. This was a huge blow to my sense of trust.

Then rage started burning in me like a gaseous fire. I looked at Facebook, but this time I picked up something different — a very tiny discrepancy from its usual newsfeed, which I looked at many times every day on different devices. So I knew the setup very well. I could tell it was fake! My friends were not making these posts. They were coming from a single source in a stream that mimicked the usual Facebook newsfeed with real people. Despite my limited knowledge about computers and the internet, I quickly concluded that it would take a lot of computer-talented personnel and many resources to force-feed a stream between my Facebook address/ID and the real Facebook newsfeed with my real friends. Moreover, it would take a lot more computing power to hold the stream there to give me enough time to see it and ignite certain feelings. Whoever was doing this was no average person ... or people.

This realization scared me beyond what I imagined to be the furthest point fear could go. My morning started with a popular radio preacher condemning me, and moments later, I underwent a cyberattack of hurtful insults. The people behind it worked so hard to make me think the posts were coming from my friends. I was dealing with people using their mighty power to attack me for reasons I couldn't yet figure out. My mind was filled with questions about who they might be.

Then I remembered some six or eight months ago while I was in another city. I thought I saw someone spying on me, watching and following me all over the city. It was like I was supposed to lead him somewhere, perhaps to an illegal underground group. I didn't bother much with the situation because I knew I wasn't hiding anything. I was acquainted with so many people from different parts of the world and with different behaviors, lifestyles, religions, races, and so on because I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: AuthorHouse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1546251243
• ISBN 13: 9781546251248
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 108
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar