Rothesay — Wannabe computer hacker Ryan McReynolds, 14, was trying out some new hacking software he torrented when he accidentally hacked into his own computer and mobile phone, planting a virus that deleted all of his contacts, messages, emails, photos, videos and his first-class boarding pass for an Air Canada flight to Bermuda on Friday.
“I know, I know. How the fsck could I pwn myself?” he tweeted from a borrowed mobile phone in reply to a request for comments. “Don’t you think I’ve asked myself that question 1,000 times already?”
McReynolds admits he also taunted himself on Twitter during the hack in a feeble attempt to “claim ownership of the situation,” with some of his tweets reposted as many as 200,000 times. Some of the tweets appear as follows:
“Yeah, I feel like an idiot. And the twitterverse is all friggin over it, thank you very much.”
“So easy to sit there in your comfy chair and anonymously crap on somebody who made an honest mistake.”
“Look, can you just send somebody over here to fix this? I have the money. I’m desperate.”
Thousands of people around the world have downloaded the software McReynolds used to erase his entire digital life — Backdoor Rocker 3 — but The Manatee could find no other reports of someone using it to attack themselves while using social media to document being both attacker and unsuspecting victim.
“Parts of me really hate other parts of me. Plus I’m being ridiculed online all over the world. On the plus side, I have a lot of new followers,” McReynolds said minutes before accidentally reporting his Twitter account for online abuse of himself.
Efforts to reach him for additional comments have failed: his Twitter account appears to have been suspended.
McReynolds’ problems may be much worse than he suspects. The federal Justice Department officials say they’ve opened an investigation into whether the hapless hacker violated the Harper government’s new cyberbullying legislation.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re abusing other people or abusing yourself: abuse is abuse and we intend to stop it, online or in real life,” department spokesperson Ellen Richardson said in an email.
She confirmed the department has asked the Rothesay youth’s Internet Service Provider for his phone and Internet records.
“If the comments that Mr. McReynolds made to himself did, indeed, come from Mr. McReynolds, and we can prove that, he could be facing up to 10 years of prison time,” she said.