Comment by 4ggr0

my younger brother called me once, which was unusual, so i immediately answered. he was crying, which was new to me as well, and told me that our mom's laptop he had been using to game on was hacked, and that he was now being extorted live in a discord call.

asked him to shutdown the laptop immediately and add me to the call, to which he replied, "they sent me our postal code and told me if i told anyone or turned the laptop off, they're going to send someone to hurt me."

that's when i realized why he was panicking so much, to me who was 10 years older that was an obvious scare-tactic, he was a young, naive teenager so he was legitimately scared for his life.

was able to calm him down, he added me to the call, and turned the laptop off. i was surprised that the hackers in question were 3-4 french teenagers, incredibly rude and aggressive. they didn't care that they weren't able to ruffle my feathers, they just constantly asked for bitcoins, said they'd hurt our mom etc.

when i refused and just didn't engage they started posting our mom's tax returns and other files from her laptop, that's when i realized that they did indeed exfiltrate data.

immediately packed my bags and took the next train to meet mom and brother. we spent the afternoon rotating e-banking passwords etc.

while doing this, the hackers did try to login to her paypal and they actually got into my netflix account.

turned the wifi off at home to boot the laptop back up, wanted to try to retrace their steps. i did find out what kind of stealer they used and was able to sleaze my way into a secret discord server they used to organize, but it was temporary and they had already left. so i just wiped the laptop and reinstalled windows.

apparently these guys had promised my brother to optimize his PC so that Fortnite would run better, he let them connect via AnyConnect or TeamViewer, don't exactly remember. they did some legit debloating stuff etc., but also let a stealer run in the background. apparently these guys had spent some weeks in the discord server my brother was in to establish trust.

to this day i haven't felt as much rage again. seeing my young brother in such a distressed state, realizing that all of my mom's data, childhood pictures etc. were stolen made me angry to a point i've never felt, i legitimately wanted to find out who these guys were and hurt them as much as i could. of course we all calmed down again and realized there's nothing we could do other than rotate PWs and observe logins.

police said there's nothing they could do (didn't expect it anyways, but worth a try), discord ignored me when i reported the hacker's accounts. typing this out again makes me angry again, interestingly enough. it's been two years, almost forgot that this ever happened.