October 2025

‘Is it supposed to do that?’.

No. No, it wasn’t.

After months of work and a couple of long years, I'd finally finished my new website.

I was buzzing. Wanting to take a victory lap, I sent a link to my buddy in New Zealand. It was the evening for him, so he shouldn’t be working and might be online.

He sent me a screenshot.

‘Warning: Dangerous site. Attackers might install software on your device. We recommend returning to safety.’

I thought I’d squished that bug. The last part of launching my website was creating the security certificate. The certificate tells your browser the site is safe. When it finds one, a little padlock appears next to the address bar and the page loads.

‘Don’t worry. You can ignore that. The SSL certificate must still be loading. Click proceed and the site will show up. I’d love to know what you think.’

‘Erm…’

My buddy sent me another screenshot. I nearly dropped my phone.

'Hot threesomes. Are you looking for fun in your zip code?'

‘That’s not my website!’

‘Did you see the URL? Do you own it? It looks Russian.’

When visiting my website, you would start on jamoe.org and then get redirected to some garbled subdomain of random letters and asked about your interest in getting better acquainted with lonely strangers living in your area.

At the bottom of the page was some Cyrillic and a brag from the company considered the Google of Russia, ‘Powered by Yandex’.

‘No, that’s not my address. OK. I need to go home. I know what’s happening. I need my laptop’.

‘Good luck beating back the Russians’

‘Thanks!’

I scrambled out of the café.

Damn, I can’t catch a break.

---

Talking to the engineers was my favourite part of working at Google. After work, I would hop on the 38 bus and bumble my way to Victoria where all the techies were based. The Victoria office also had my second favourite thing about working at Google: free dinner.

It was during our evening chats tinkering with 3D printers and playing table football that I learned a large chunk of internet traffic was the handiwork of robots. That was in 2013. It’s even more true now.

Some of the robots are friendly. Google has a robot, usually called ‘Googlebot’ or ‘spider’ – because it crawls the web – that helps to build the database used to return results when you make a search. The Russian robot behind my website takeover was not so friendly.

What happened to me was the equivalent of popping to the shops and getting burgled because a small window on the second floor of the house was left unlocked. There was a moment, perhaps just a few hours, when my website was exposed despite my best efforts. In that time, a Russian bot had found the vulnerability, injected a redirect, and moved on to its next target.

I’ve always understood web addresses as postal addresses with coordinates behind them. Jamoe.org tells the internet where to go like 24 Marigold Cottage tells a postman where to deliver a letter. Behind that neat label there’s a set of numbers, the real location, pointing to the server that holds the site’s text, images, styles, and videos.

For this hack, the robot had changed where the postman delivered my mail. While the envelope still said jamoe.org, the numbers underneath pointed to a server the hackers controlled instead of mine. Why a threesome finding website? Well, because money.

In the world of affiliate marketing, if you help a business achieve one of their goals, you’ll get a commission. Of the commissions, two industries endure as reliable piggy banks for the ambitious affiliate marketer: porn and crypto.

People who click usually create accounts, spend money, or at the very least generate ad views. These events then trigger a payout to whoever sent them. It’s not a huge sum of money per person, but if you’re crawling hundreds of thousands of websites a day and tempting just a sliver of that redirected traffic to ‘Find lonely strangers’, it all adds up.

‘Apologies. We are on it and appreciate your patience. The certificate takes time to propagate and update across the internet.’

I’d escalated the issue to the top gurus on tech support chat. They had tweaked some settings and were adamant that there was nothing to do now but wait.

I’d contained the damage. I took my website offline to prevent potential readers from falling prey to the entrapping redirect. This gave me some peace, but I was still itching to switch the site back on and finally get closure.

Redoing the website had been an open wound for about two years. My old designer said he would take care of it. I had asked for updates, but he made excuses, dragged things out, and then disappeared. He left a huge amount of damage, pain, and expense in his wake. It felt like a bomb had gone off inside my church.

A couple of months later, my mum passed away. A year went by and nothing changed. I was too crippled. Then my dad passed away. Between bouts of grief, I would think about the dreams I'd had before I'd been broken and how close I came to touching them.

Before all that, my first shock was being made redundant during the pandemic. I understood why it happened, but it still felt like having your parachute slashed after being pushed out of a plane. Newly unemployed and slightly unhinged by the global health crisis, I decided it was the ideal time to start my own business. I had always wanted to do it, so why not now?
At first, it worked. Two of the things I made went viral. I was discovering my voice and building a readership. All I had to do was keep my head down, keep the momentum up, and lean in.

Of course, none of that happened. At the exact moment when I felt like I could breathe again, everything unravelled. Which is why I was especially pissed off at these hackers. I was finally moving forward, reconciling with my orphaned dreams, and they desecrated the symbol of my new start.

Bastards.

‘OK, that’s all fixed for you now, sir.’

Thank the gods.

---

‘Everything you’re about to see is completely made up on the spot. To inspire what we do, we’d love to know what’s happened to you this week?’

The Russians had been beaten back. Now I wanted to laugh, forget, and escape the confines of my flat, so I went to an improv show. That wasn’t without risk; comedy hosts always have a way of making you overshare.

The crowd that night was quiet, which was odd for a Friday. No one wanted to reveal the hijinks from their week. I threw the improvisers a bone. I’d been in their shoes, standing on stage trying to pull suggestions from an audience, and silence is far scarier than any heckle a tipsy punter might chuck at you.

‘I got hacked by Russians!’

‘Wait. What? Where are you?’

Oh crap.

A spotlight landed on me and the interrogation began: what do you mean? What did they do? How did they do it? A threesome finding website!?

I felt like a celebrity on a talk show: the whole room itching to know the details of my misadventure. But I did feel everyone pull back when I brought up security certificates and domain name servers, so I bit my tongue before I lost them.

‘And what does the website do?‘

‘I write articles to help people with learning and I wrote a book.’

Someone from the backline of performers spoke. They’d spotted something.

‘Who’s the typical person going to your site?’

‘Students mostly, but there’s a big range’.

The woman from the backline paused: ’How old are these students?’

Oh, yeah. Damn.

‘No, no, no! Like university students!’

‘Oh, thank god!’ The host raised his hand up to calm the crowd. ‘It’s alright. It’s alright. Everyone’s an adult.’

Someone else from the backline had a question.

‘So, the Russians hacked your website to help students find group sex in their neighbourhoods?’

‘Yeah, I guess so.’

The host, a man in his late-thirties, chimed in again: ‘It’s been a hot minute since I was at uni, but, if I’m not way off, students especially like hooking up and they’re paying a lot of money to learn. Wouldn’t the situation with the Russian hackers be like the ideal collaboration for you?’

We all laughed.

‘What’s the book about?’

‘How to take notes to learn faster.’

‘And what’s the book called?’

I went shy and chuckled, ‘If I say, it’ll seem like this whole thing has been a massive set up.’

‘No, no, it’s fine. We want to know.’

Then the host started a chant and the audience joined in, ‘Name the book! Name the book! Name the book!’

‘Oxford Notes,’ I was feeling emboldened and cheekier now, so added a post-script, ‘And it comes with a free gift.’

I regretted my cheekiness immediately. I had written about the free gift, but I’d never spoken about it out loud, let alone in front of a crowd.

Everyone let out a cheery groan.

‘Oh, OK. Here we go. Hit us with the free gift.’

‘Err… the free gift is my late-mum’s homemade curry recipe, as the book is dedicated to her.’

‘Well, screw me. If that isn’t the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s excellent. I think we’ve got everything we need now for our show.’

Applause broke out, the lights crashed to black, and the opening scene was a mother and son in a kitchen.

‘Jamie, I made your favourite.’

The mother placed a mimed plate down in front of the sitting man.

‘Ah, curry! Thanks mum.’

The mum stepped back and put one hand on her hip, ‘I see you dedicated your book to your father.’

‘Yeah. Well, he did proofread a few chapters.’

‘Oh, did he now? A few chapters… I suppose that beats giving you the gift of life and going through 47 hours of labour.’

I had never spoken about my mum in public like that before. Part of me believed that if I kept it locked away, it might make her passing less true.

What I hadn’t expected was that saying the ugly truth out loud would make me feel lighter. I also hadn’t expected that it would immediately be turned into a wry stage play.

I laughed. It was too surreal. With each punchline, I noticed more and more that the tourniquet I had wound around my heart was coming loose. I felt my eyes starting to prickle.

As the next scene started and a pair of improvisers took on the role of the Russian hackers, I thought back to my freezer.

Even after I moved out, my mum always cooked extra and put the leftovers in takeaway pots. I told her she didn’t have to, but she ignored me. Whenever I would visit, she’d pull a stack of them out of the freezer. Each pot was labelled in her handwriting, all accompanying chutneys and pickles paired perfectly.

I thought about how parents pour so many hopes and dreams into the food they make for their children. My mum took that idea personally. She even refused to let us cook Christmas lunch when she was battling cancer. We helped, of course, but she said that as long as she was around, she would do it. She was admitted to hospital for the last time the following day.

I recalled the last frozen meal I had in the freezer that was made by her hand. It was a humble meal, but one that mum and I loved: a coconut red bean dish that she had learned in Tanzania.

I eventually ate it the way we used to at home, with polenta – though, we’d always called it by its Swahili name, ugali. I had hesitated for months after my mum’s passing, but my fear of the meal spoiling from freezer burn outweighed losing the last trace I had of my mum’s cooking.

I zoned back into the show and caught the climatic moment when the leaders of the free world saved their university-aged children from being entangled in the Russian ploy to steal state secrets.

I left the theatre thinking about my mum’s wishes for me, how she made food so I could eat well, worry less, and have enough energy to chase my next dream.

Now the website was done, I could get going again on that dream. Russian hackers be damned.

P.S. If you happened to visit my website when it got taken over by hackers and made use of the services that were offered therein, I'd love to hear how that went. Did you find love?