A couple of days ago I posted a blog that humorously claimed my account here had been hacked. The simulation became reality when yesterday morning those hosting this website closed it down fearing the site might be infected because someone appeared to have hacked my account. I thought this was fantastic since I’d used over-the-top hacker speak and imagery that was so bombastic it was almost too real!

However what I found strange was that prior to this happening no one seemed to have noticed that three days ago I had actually hacked into Robert Steijn’s account on this site – all those contributing blogs here have separate accounts and passwords. I didn’t do anything malicious when I hacked this account. I left the password as it was and all the posts as I found them. I didn’t vandalise anything as teenage hackers tend to do. I just added a post headlined ‘i’m not me‘ that notified people of the hack. I also used an illustration Steijn had uploaded earlier to make it look visually like one of his posts.

There is a screenshot of me logged into Steijn’s account above with the completed post open. But more than my ‘real’ hacking in this instance, I’m far more excited that my ‘social hacking’ caused the site to be closed down temporarily. I’d planned to reveal my role in the hack once it was noticed anyway, the ‘social hack’ I’d conceived as a way of demonstrating how if I’d wanted evade blame for the non-malicious hacking on this site I’d have created a decoy (making it look like my account had been hacked as well, since I hacked three of the four operative accounts here – and if I could work out a system of auto-hacking I’d have hacked my own account as well). When I hacked the other two accounts I simply reposted blogs that had already appeared on here (in between my series of ‘I ❤ Repetition‘ posts) since I wanted to make more connections between what was being posted by the four current users.

I was really happy to see Robert Steijn making a reply post to the one I hacked into his account that responded with good humour to a cyber prank! So now I feel there is finally a real connection to the blogs everyone is posting here!