We Were Hacked! A Message From Our Founder
Can you believe it? Hackers and thieves this year in February of 2023 tried to take us down. And, it almost worked. I was so frustrated.
So, if I was a money thief, or just wanted to cause some overall havoc and mayhem to a newly formed 501c3 organization, I’d maybe think to myself…”Hmmm, let’s go steal money from women with cancer.” It was quite a first quarter. ANd second quarter began the real cleanup. At the end of last year, I had poured tens of thousands of dollars in my own money to get this organization started. Although I had a supportive board, just like cancer, no one really does the dirty work but the patient. In this case, when my non profit was hacked, nobody did the dirty-work of cleaning up the identity theft and the online trail but me, The Founder. The very one who needs the less stress in her recoverd-from-cancer altruistic life.
Right before leaving for a trip, my husband lost his job and then two days later, my right hand of 9 years – quit with no notice in an email to go work for a friend, who also was on this board, leaving me with a cascade of work to clean up.
Then, my personal Instagram with thousands of medical, pharmacy, and business followers was hacked and taken down. (By the way, my new IG is @drannearvizu – follow me there on Instagram today.)
And if that wasn’t enough for one good human, the third bomb, or series of bombs started to drop. I was traveling and at meetings and I kept getting ping after ping. Your linked in code is…Your paypal code is…Your stripe code is…
OMG.
What’s going on?
It literally was like all hell had broken loose.
I had no assistant to call, so I had to hole myself up in a hotel room and lock down my credit bureaus and my accounts and change as many passwords as possible. Even I was locked out of some.
Thankfully, I had security set up, but I had to change passwords on over 80 accounts on our backend. It took months for me to clean everything the way I wanted. Thankfully, I believe all things work out for my highest and best good. Creating this organization was a calling. I had a vision for it at 3AM during my own surgical recovery, and I answered the call to help others. So, deep down, I knew it would work out.
Some mistakes and problems I could fix and some I could not. I had to step back and evaluate everything. To protect donors, I even shut our bank accounts down and will need to re-set everything up. I still can not access stripe and had to stop taking donations online for this reason, again to protect donors. I had to pay for some initial website changes, and then learn to make other changes myself. In fact, BIG SHOUTOUT to my dear friend, Brandi Bernoskie, who walked me through some final changes that had to be legally made on this website. At least the big stuff is taken care of, for the time being. More changes to the website and how I want to offer our resources, based on experience, and the real life needs of those who have connected to the ECF, will be forthcoming.
It’s summer now. Time for me to write, rest, reflect and plan out Q3 and 4 for life and business.
I am looking forward to positing again and making an announcement this September.
The rest of the paperwork and IRS and California and FL transition will take me several more months and most likely even into mid next year to get new approvals on a different 501c3 structure that suits my vision even better.
So here’s the good news. Truth be told, I ran out on this quest guns blazing and with a board of directors all telling me what they thought this organization should look like. And at then end of the year, after doing most of the work myself and paying one employee from my personal savings, I nearly sputtered out. I was exhausted before any of this hacking even happened. But I am so glad to reframe the entire debacle as an opportunity to pull the needle off the record of a song I didn’t like and compose a new one. I can even sincerely say, I look back in love.
If you follow my business consulting, training and coaching company, you may know that I’m the creator of THE CORELIFE METHOD, Founder of The Corelife Coach Institute and author of the book Affluent Minds, Core Expression for a Rich and Wonderful Life. I invented the model that takes you from what I call the negative C-O-R-E-4 (chaos, overwhelm, resistance and exhaustion) and helps you transform back to your ideal state of being Centered, Open, Resilient & Energized (my positive C-O-R-E-4). So I had an opportunity to go back to my own method and model and proverbial drawing board and have fun recreating a strong vision and foundation for our tribe. I’ll leak some more secrets soon 🙂
Until then, know you are loved, healed and held,
and that I am deeply grateful for you.
Here’s to Miracles,
Anne
