A business I work for got hacked and a forwarded racist rant message "Dr. Fauci's N!66ers" went viral. Various offensive documents with absurd, Ku Klux Klan sounding language were sent out under the auspices of staff. There was later a big apology for a security breach by the owner of the company.

I have a social media account in order to work there. As my account is directly tied in with their system, it's very likely that my account was also compromised. Messages uncharacteristic of me were sent out to individuals and it seemed as if whoever hacked it had gone through my data enough to sound like me.

Also, my bank account, which I have had since 2006, was also compromised during that period. During that time period, I have had mischarges that were quickly corrected - but this time, I encountered an "out of patron" transaction that caused my entire account to be shut down. 

This is why I do not like social media. You do not know what is real and it is fully possible to catch and compromise someone.This can get people in trouble for no reason and can terrorize people. Accounts can be faked, screenshots can be faked, videos can be faked and messages can be faked.

I have heard stories of people using Zoom who have suddenly had their video feed disrupted with gruesome images they didn't know the origin of. The people who do this are methodical and hacking is apparently now quite commonplace.

This phenomenon disturbingly seems like the sort of deception and menace that arose 100 years ago, after a pandemic, when the Ku Klux Klan really took shape nationwide, modernized for an era of Russian trolls and hackers. Hacks, shadowbans and cyberbullying are the new whitesheets and ski masks.

I don't know if the hacking I experienced was from Russian hackers. Whoever did it was able to do things that I haven't seen before - bypassing bank accounts and cloud systems. It could have been someone with too much time on their hands, who just wanted to see people embarrassed and hurt. However, since we hear about Russian hacking so much in the news, let's entertain for a minute what that would mean if it were Russian hackers.

There is a book about the ideology of Eurasianism called Black Wind, White Snow by journalist Charles Clover. In the book, Clover details the genesis and evolution of the ideology. It started with intellectual Lev Gumilev, often quoted by Vladimir Putin himself, who spent a significant amount of time in gulag, with all of his decisions made under the jurisdiction of the Soviets.

His ideology largely identified Russia as something completely apart from the West, born from Mongols and other steppe peoples. This was clearly bad news in Stalin's Russia, which destroyed what was left of the Mongol Empire and sought a pan-national identity based on Marxism, an ideology that came out of the west. 

Incredibly, when the Soviet Union fell, Gumilev was upset. Putin, who later gained authority, has deemed the dissolution of the USSR a "catastrophe." Based on that book, along with interviews Putin himself did with Oliver Stone, it seems like the current ideology in Russia is enthused quite a bit with the concepts of division and unity. In a quote in conversation with Stone, Putin said of the US that "it seems they need an external enemy to keep themselves in check."

The idea that Russia was launching a tactical cybersecurity war against the West seemed ridiculous until you actually see what hacking looks like up close. Seeing an uncharacteristic message from a trusted or reliable source shakes up your perception of reality. Putin's statement that America "needs an external enemy to keep itself in check" accord with the idea that if hackers just messed with Americans' heads enough to turn them against one another, their whole system would collapse like the USSR did.

Christopher Hitchens, who by the 2000s had become an obsessive national security hawk, warned of the looming danger of Vladimir Putin long before Joe Biden or Mitt Romney:

Given how much of our lives we have turned over to technology, this is as much of an existential threat to our country as atomic weapons.