There are two “creepiest things” that I can think of. The first thing that happened to me was that I found a site claiming to be a “red room” (there are lots of these), and I contacted the admin to find out some information.
We emailed back and forth for a little bit, and then I assumed the site was a scam. So I wrote a blog post about it, and somehow, the admin of the site found the blog post and read it.
He then posted a bunch of my personal information on his site, including my name, my wife’s name, where I worked, and where I lived. I assume he got this information via social engineering somehow, but it doesn’t really matter anymore. Thankfully, that site is down now.
The only other scary thing that happened to me (more recently) was that I found out some of my accounts were part of a few of the big data breaches, and that some of the information had been leaked on the dark web (according to the software I used, anyway).
What I did was to change my passwords on all the leaked accounts, or just delete them entirely. At the very least, these were all accounts that I don’t use anymore! I think these types of incidents are far more common than the greatly exaggerated horror stories that a lot of people tell.
I still listen to some of those anyway, because - I admit it - I’m just a horror junkies.
