How I was hacked and lost my 2017 freelance earnings

This was really painful, I was hacked and my freelance 2017 earnings were stolen away! I will share my experience and how to protect yourself from potential hacking attacks.

I work as freelancer and used Payoneer to collect my earnings. On the 14/02/2017 (coincidentally, on Valentine's day of 2017) a supposed potential client contacted me with a project request and sent me an MS document file supposedly to contain more detailed description about the project. But unfortunately, the client was a fake and he was just a hacker looking to collect innocent peoples password to there online bank accounts.

The MS document file he sent to me actually contains some VB macro scripts that runs in the background of a PC to extract/grab login credentials saved on the web browser.

Few hours after I opened the file, I got notification that my funds were been transferred out of my account  an unknown email account tied to payoneer and that was how it all happened.

Honestly it sucks to see a potential client turning out to be a hacker. See (image above) the message he sent to me and I was looking up to working with a legitimate buyer, but unfortunately I was wrong.

The hacker transferred or stole my funds to this payoneer email account at: baland.v@yandex.ru

I know my God will never allow him go free! I have reported this issue already to my God and other relevant authorities.

How to protect yourself from potential hacking attacks

1- Never save important logins details on your web browser, even if you are working from your personal computer. Device a way of saving/remembering your passwords that no script can read remotely.

2- Never trust any MS doc file that contains VB macros. If you most open such file make sure you are not connected to the internet or at least use a different trash PC to open it.

3- Always use anti virus to scan files you received (especially from first time clients) and change your login credentials regularly.

I hope this safes someone out there from being the next victim.

Stay safe!

Essential tools or Websites to help you understand, test and generate regular expressions

Hello there,

Recently, I was working on a project that requires me to search through bunch of text and identify some matched patterns within the text, this is what "regex" is good at. So I thought of finding a tool that will ease my way through the project and fortunately, there are many of such tools on the internet.

I wrote this post just to highlight and share with you some of the regex tools I have tested. Just in case you didn't know what regex is here is a quick intro....

RegEx written in full as "Regular Expression" is a pattern that consist of rules used to match a certain set of strings. Regular Expressions are an essential part of any programmer’s toolkit. They can be very handy when you need to identify, replace or modify text, words, patterns or characters.

RegEx is a concept that is found in any programming language. The syntax of regular expressions is the same for all programming and script languages.
Below, you will find tools that are primarily associated with a programming language while others are generic to all languages.

Here is the list:-

• http://pythex.org
• http://regexpal.com/
• https://regex101.com
• http://www.regextester.com
• http://regexr.com
• https://www.regexbuddy.com
• http://regular-expressions.mobi
• http://regexlib.com
• https://regexone.com
• http://www.regexter.com/
• http://www.rubular.com
• http://kodos.sourceforge.net
• http://www.txt2re.com
• http://buildregex.com
• http://www.regexe.com
• http://www.regextester.com
• http://www.phpliveregex.com
• http://regexstorm.net

Useful Tutorials:

1- What are the best resources for learning RegEx?
2- Essential Guide To Regular Expressions: Tools and Tutorials
3- Regular Expressions: 30 Useful Tools and Resources


Thanks for reading