Synchronicities, Coincidences, Paranoia, All Three?
The left turn signal indicator on the dash flashed an abnormally bright green, and then my car headlights went out while on a curve at night. Fortunately there was plenty of street lighting.Then the car radio volume control was stuck ot 50% and wouldn't budge until I started the car the next day. Then the touch lamps in my house started coming on by themselves again.
Early one morning not long afterwards, I turned to enter my little home office, and my PC somehow woke-up out of sleep mode before I touched anything. Wake On LAN is off, and the only way to wake it is by a wired mouse button command. The laser is off, so slight movement of the sensor from desk vibration is not a factor.
Then on August 09, 2020, a frequent flashing of my CPU's LED activity light caught my attention and it turned out that my Network activity was very high, even though I wasn't doing much. So I restarted my PC hoping it would go away, but that didn't work.
After the restart, Resource Monitor was showing network traffic on the Network Activity monitor from OFFICE.cipherkey.com, as well as several other dot-cypherkey addresses. This got me curious. Why does it look like my PC is communicating with cypherkey.com? It turns out that cypherkey is a nuclear hardened security protected data center in Vancouver BC.
To Quote Them Directly:
The CipherKey datacenter and colocation facility is located in the
basement of the old BC Hydro headquarters in Vancouver, BC. The
facility basement was originally designed to withstand the effects of
a nuclear bomb, and is located next step to the Vancouver downtown
power substation. Secured access to the facility is available 24/7.
970 Burrard Street, Vancouver BC
At that point I began to wonder if everything on my PC was compromised, and if so by who? I also had the notion that if I was hacked so that my PC could be taken over, then taking these notes would be pointless because they could simply hack in and erase them. So I had the brilliant idea of posting them here.
This is Cypher Key:
CipherKey Exchange Corporation, ISP Wholesaler servicing Western Canada. Started offering wholesale connectivity services back in the days of dial-up internet.
www.cipherkey.com