Cyber Attack

My name is Mark, the past few years of my life has been very eventful leaving a trail of negative lasting impressions of me with most people I came in contact with. I have had way too many moments that have led to a lot of burnt bridges, broken relationships and huge disappointments from friends and relatives. Also I have been caught on the wrong side with the law so in a nutshell I haven’t really been living up to acceptable standards of good behavior, all these past few years I have been in a foreign country, so far from home and from anyone who truly knows me. But I am going to tell you of one event that shook my world so bad it has taken me more than 6 months to make sense of it all and be able to put it into a coherent tale.

I can’t honestly say when, how, why or where all this begun but November 29th 2016, I woke up just like every other morning with my radio on tuned into a certain Christian radio station. The mornings of my past few years had been very bad given that I would have to wake up to the radio playing encouraging songs and sermons just to get me out of bed. But the morning of this day was a very very bad morning for me because some days ago one of the most important women in my life had passed. The grief I felt was brewing up into a huge one filled not only with her death but with the deaths of all the other people I loved, my parents, my 2 younger siblings etc. In the midst of all this cascade of sorrow, there was also the fact that I wasn’t even going to attend her funeral because it was thousands of miles away across the ocean. My account was at zero, I had debts with every loan shark in town and to top it up piles and piles of mail from debt collectors all over the country. All the 27 years of my life I had nothing to show for except for a bunch of excuses, bad decisions and very bad drama. Every day the past few years I felt a growing disappointment with myself but on this day each thought of the bad decisions made was amplifying this feeling to heights I never felt before. I told myself to pull together, I then started comforting myself with the fact that my writing was catching a healthy following on social media and the internet. I even created a Facebook page dedicated towards community development so I told myself there was hope to turn things around. So to reinforce this little hope I was having I turned to the one place I had been turning to for encouragement every morning of the past few years. I started listening to the radio station and on air was a preacher I had listened to many times before.

But you’re never going to guess what he chose his sermon to be this morning. He was talking about my Facebook page posts, it was very flattering and I was like a moment ago I felt very insignificant and here is a renowned pastor talking about my posts on a radio station that that thousands are tuned into. As flattering as this moment was, His sermon was rather an attack to the work I was doing. He felt I was someone who once knew God and somehow 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 extremely sinful and rebellious to God.

My belief in the words of this pastor was evident with how messed up my life was, He went on and on talking until my mind became shadowed and taken over by the earlier mentioned feelings of disappointment, I was now starting to feel like a big disappointment to my friends, to my relatives, to society and now also to God. I sat down with the biggest feeling of guilt and shame that I felt the need to be exorcised or something. I then remembered a time that I got in touch with one of the radio station DJs to show my appreciation for the work they were doing. I figured that was how they probably looked through my Facebook activity and found that I was admin for a page with quite a decent following. I then got confused at why this pastor could not just approach me to talk about it. I wondered if I was that bad to even reach out to, I was disappointed that he had to make a radio program to dent my work. I pulled together with reason that He is a man and entitled to his opinion, and opinions are not facts. But it was very disappointing that one of the people I looked to for inspiration was now attacking me with assumptions. Little did I know that there was self-doubt brewing in my mind after listening to this radio program, so my attempt to have my hope fix that morning ended up eroding the little hope that I had built up and I was back to zero with memories of bad decisions and negativity around me completely taking over my mind.

And that was how my morning started as I jumped out of bed and walked out of my room into the living room of the 2nd floor 2 story townhouse I lived in. I didn’t have a smart phone so it was time for me to check on my social media activities especially see how my page was doing. I sat down on the couch to use the computer that was connected to the plasma TV.

I turned on the TV computer already on so I quickly logged into my and what I found broke my calm collected mindset and personality. It appeared all my Facebook friends within a 50 mile radius of my address had somehow woke up to make insulting posts about me on Facebook, my newsfeed from top to bottom was filled with all these offensive posts targeted to me. It was more like they all called each other before and agreed to do this that morning. The shock of this reality made me question my senses , I started thinking my mind was playing tricks on me, it was unbelievably weird that with one of the top preachers making a sermon about me and now all this stuff in my newsfeed from people that I obviously need support from. I then called one of my pastor friends through Gmail and told her that something weird was going on with me, I told her I didn’t exactly sure what it was but thought I was seeing and hearing things that aren’t real. She asked me to stay put and that she will come see me as soon as possible, The insults were too much and very personal I felt my privacy violated on the most extreme levels I didn’t want to look anymore.

Feelings of being a reject flooded my mind like water into a dam, this was a huge blow to my sense of trust with people as rage started burning in me like gaseous fire. I looked back on the Facebook but this time my intense look picked up something, a very tiny discrepancy from the usual Facebook newsfeed that I looked at many times every day with different devices so I knew the setup with somewhat higher precision. I could tell that it was fake in the sense that my friends were not making those posts, they were coming from a single source as a stream that mimicked the usual Facebook newsfeed with real people. With the little knowledge about computers and the internet I quickly concluded that it would take a lot of computing power, computer talented personnel and lots of resources to force-feed a stream in between my Facebook address/ID and the real Facebook newsfeed with my real friends, moreover, even a lot more computing power to hold the stream there to give me enough time to see it and ignite certain feelings. I figured that whoever was doing this was no average person or people.

This realization gave me a scare beyond what I imagined to be the furthest point fear could go, given that my morning started with a radio program from a top preacher condemning me and then moments later a cyberattack with hurtful insults that the people behind it worked so hard on to make me think that it was coming from my friends. I quickly imagined that I was dealing with people using their mighty power to attack for reasons that I wasn’t even able to figure out at that moment because my mind was filled with questions of who these people might be. I then started remembering a time some 6-8 months ago in another city when I was I thought I saw someone spying on me, watching and following me all over the city from a distance like I was supposed to lead him somewhere, maybe like an illegal underground group. Though this was disappointing, I didn’t bother much with the situation because I knew I wasn’t hiding anything. I had so many acquaintances with so many people from different parts of the world, of many different behaviors, lifestyles, religions, races etc mainly because I liked meeting people and listening to their stories. I figured it was this eccentric and friendly nature and concluded that it was the government doing surveillance on me just to be sure that I wasn’t a threat to society or whatever they hold dear. I questioned myself at the time if this wasn’t just paranoia but I failed to see it as coincidence to see the same person in different spaced-out parts of a city with a population of over 6 million. So given the logic that this memory was serving, the radio program, the computing power and the amount of effort and time that went into putting the stream together, I concluded that only a government would be that powerful and be behind this whole thing that was happening to me on the morning of that day, I wasn’t too quick to point out which government it was though for reasons like I didn’t have solid evidence to substantiate that claim, also I had knowledge that countries agree to open borders for each other to have operatives spy on certain individuals of interest without giving reason to the host nation. So I wasn’t sure if it was the government of the country I am from, or the government of the country I was in or maybe some other unknown government to me, or my other consideration was that the possibility of governments working together behind all this.

The thought that I was an enemy to established political powers and that it was the reason why the pastor freely made that program and openly condemned me and my writing was supported by the possibility of my Facebook page being a threat to the order of economics and power in place given that I strongly spoke against inequality, and spoke for freedom and unity etc. But I still felt it was within my rights to speak and share information and this attempt was a violation to my freedom of speech. Moreover, given the amount of personal information in that stream I felt my privacy was breached and this cyberattack was evident of that. Then my anger was at red alert, I felt my head boiling at the hypocrisy of many public figures including the pastor that made the radio program against me. I was so angry my body started shaking and that anger increased with lack of physical reach towards these people so I can let it out on them until I was completely out of control and responded the only way that I felt I could. It must have been because this whole thing was started by a radio sermon against me, at about 2PM I started posting Bible verses on Facebook at a rate faster than I could type, post after post after post I flooded my Facebook timeline with more Bible verse posts, and then I switched to rants upon rants towards, Christians, Muslims and people of all religions of how sinful and judgmental just like everyone else, my rants went on to how society as well can fail to follow these teachings and be judgmental in the same manner. I then started ranting of how small and venerable I was and how it was unfair that powerful people were treating me the way they were.

It wasn’t until after people started commenting on my Facebook rant and messaging me that I realized how much my anger had taken over me and narrowed me into acting on impulse. My earlier conclusion was much like Ernest Rutherford when he shot a beam of alpha particles on a sheet of gold foil and hypothesized that the gold foil would repel the all the alpha particles, my conclusion before making the posts was that what I was typing would fall on their fake stream and that none of my friends would see my rants, the opposite happened and now all the people on my friends list saw the posts I was making without stop for a straight 10 minutes and probably flooded their entire newsfeed. OOPS! My day was now turning into a nightmare as reactions from my friends demanded an explanation, some of them were pissed off and some were mocking me. This became a perfect moment for anybody who was holding any negative or malicious words to say about me to do it without worry of consequence. I realized of how I made my problems worse now, I opened up a battlefront when I was being whooped on the other ones. I quickly walked inside my apartment both hands holding my head, I quickly walked down the stairs out the door and sat out on the concrete stairs of the whole building. I contemplated on the impeding confrontations that were yet to come my way from friends and relatives. I then observed the street feeling like a crowd with pitch folks and stones will soon appear to purge their anger with me. But all I saw was the construction crew that was doing renovations to our building, they had been having access to my apartment fitting new windows the past 14 days. I then looked at the owner of the company observing him with extreme suspicion if all this renovation work was just a front to keep an up-close surveillance on me. I then began to wonder that maybe during the time that I thought they were putting new windows in my apartment were actually installing micro cameras in my apartment to watch and study my alone behavior. I even considered a possibility of having being on a live broadcasting for some days now and people probably watching me.