joviansun

Hi, I just discovered this forum only lately and I've been doing some reading here.

In the last year or so, my home internet activities and all my webmail and my ISP mailbox accounts have been hacked, monitored and read. The orchestrator of this sick activity are undoubtedly my ex-business partner and 2 of his staff from my ex-company who used this method as a harassment tactic to get me to resign. This happened when I discovered that he was practicing illegal business and making me his scape goat. So I was forced to take legal action. And all this while, I knew that they started using hacked information from my families internet activities and all my personal hotmail, gmail, yahoo, and my ISP mailbox emails at home to gossip amongst themselves in the office, and loud enough just to let me know that my home internet is being hacked. They went on to twist and distort such hacked information to try to humiliate me. Their hacker was/is some tech guy my ex-partner associated himself with. I've seen this tech guy once before. I believe there is also some blog website that they created, and have uploaded and updated their hacked and distorted information there. My ex-business partner (who use to be my old school friend) and his 2 staff have been using this to spread false information and defamation on me to my circle of friends and people in the industry of my field. He has rich strong COE friends and business associates who back him in this activity.

I left that company a year ago, but their activities are still continuing. I know this because I've helped a couple of my other old school friends in their offices, and strangely, I have noticed within a week that their staff are gossiping about the same things. Particularly of interest is my mother's and sister's doll collection hobby which they twisted into my collection instead, and recent contents of my emails.

A month ago, I came across an article at digg.com on how to check if my webmail was hacked. It suggested using the free service at www.onestat.com. So before leaving for work, I setup the trap by sending myself the bug attachment that records the hacker's IP address at Onestat. This bug attachment was sent from my sister's yahoo to my gmail. I was working at one of my friend's office at the time, and on the same day later, one staff mentioned loudly a 'yahoo' email. His superior instructed him to delete their captured IP address quickly. I was very busy that morning and did not have a chance to rush over to see what they were up to. But what they said was very clear. Reaching home that evening, I checked the status at my Onestat account and it was empty. It seems they must have pickup on my user name and password of my Onestat account as well to delete their incriminating IP address, if it was ever there. And my forced SSL access at Gmail didn't seem to make any difference at all. The email 'trap' was still marked as unread.

All these events and many more through the year has made me certain without doubt that all my webmail and even my ISP mailbox are still being monitored and read.

I have changed all my passwords of my webmail several times through the year. I have also got my ISP email address changed and changed passwords too. Unfortunately my ISP does not offer any encrypted accounts. At a reliable friend's advice, I set up a wireless router and modem, both with hardware firewall provision and setup WPA security and MAC address specific. My internet broadband type is ADSL. I was told cable was preferred in such cases, but I can't afford it. I have reinstalled my 2 XP PCs afresh many times (reformated c drive and reinstall XPsp2 and updates behind a firewall and AV) whenever I started to feel that they were sluggish. And I upgraded/rebuilt one of the PCs lately and installed XPsp2. I use Tor with Firefox, but my mother uses Opera which does not go through Tor because she is impatient with the slower speed. I have had Kaspersky Internet Security (KIS) for over a year now, and have run every possible rootkit detector, anti-keylogger, spyware detector. But have not discovered anything other than the occasional bug that KIS takes care of in an instant. But yet, it seems our internet activities are still being monitored and my webmails and ISP mailbox still compromised. And recently, my sister has been using her MacBook in the network and using Safari! And now I am using a MacBookPro with OSX10.5 to write this. And I have also setup Linux Ubuntu 7.10 as an alternative hard drive for one of the PCs.

I feel I am running out of ideas on how to prevent the hacker from monitoring, or discover the hacker with evidence and stop him. Could you please advise? This seems to be a serious practical difficulty and I'm only learning things as my research goes.

I have a few concerns at this point:

1. I don't know if some of my old work data files from early last year are infected by keylogger as KIS has not detected anything. Do keyloggers attach themselves to doc files, or jpgs or autocad dwg files, or pdf files? I don't know how this works.

2. Will paid encrypted tunnels (better than Tor) work? I know there are many such retail software in the market. Unfortunately, I believe only business packages offered by ISPs here offer some form of security options. Home packages are without such options.
Will an encrypted tunnel prevent anyone at my ISP from even working out my target website? For sites like amazon, ebay and paypal, I have to disable Tor to login for makeing purchases. These sites do not allow anonymity when purchases are made or you account gets frozen. Will it be the same for using a paid encrypted tunnel software or service?

3. How secure are webmail sites like hushmail.com and safe-mail.com? They claim to offer encrypted mail systems respectively. I don't thing my network is monitored within, but once the packet leaves my modem to the beyond, that's where the monitoring begins. But I can't be sure.

4. The above are about my PCs running XPsp2. What about security for Mac OSX 10.5. I have the firewall up, passworded user account, free ClamXav, and Firefox running through Tor. Safari seems to be too risky currently. But I'm rather new to Mac and don't know whether this security is adequate. And is there any melware scanner for the Mac?

5. How about Linux. I know even less about this as I've only installed it last weekend and got the internet and firewall working. I've no idea what AV is offered for Linux, and I've not found any means of security tunnel software for Ubuntu.

It is obvious that my ex-partner and accomplices are on a revenge streak using humilation by defamation through fabricating outrages social accusations to stir up friction in the environments where I do subcontracting work.

Please help!

Cellus

I'm going to move your thread to our General Computer Security board where members of our security team frequent more.