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With news breaking that the UK electoral register has been the subject of a massive cyber attack, is it a source of relief or concern that I was not — or probably was not, or may not have been — personally targeted in those amendments to the electoral roll on Thursday, which seemed to associate me with relationships other than my own?

Will it turn out that my reporting those amendments to the authorities — potentially along with thousands of others — prompted the Electoral Commission to urgently investigate what was going on, and only then the cyber attack was uncovered? Or is the timing merely coincidental? Have my details in any case been sold on the dark web to malicious entities at some point during the past two years in which the attack is known to have been operational?

Does my paranoia now subside, relaxing that I was simply caught up in a data haul amidst forty million others? Do I breathe a sigh of relief that I am not after all being targeted by any number of potential actors who may possibly feel aggrieved by my critical opinions, be they extremists of every slant or aggrieved celebrities and their zealous supporters? Do I return to form, and go back to my quiet existence, content that nobody at all cares what I have to say?

Or do I remain on high alert, worried that I am just the first of millions of potential victims likely to have my data used maliciously for some unknown cause, be it identity theft, fraud or some other nefarious goal? Will I now rest easy, concluding that those reading patterns were all benign after all, and that I have nothing to worry about? Well, probably not, for I have been on edge for months regardless.

For sure, the list of people who might bear me ill-will because of something I have written is long. I imagine the British National Party, English Defence League, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Al-Muhajiroun, Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, Daesh, various Salafis, Traditionalists, Neo-Traditionalists, Barelvis, Deobandis, Gulenists, the AK Parti, Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, Alpha Males, the Tory party, Corbynistas, social media influencers, celebrity sheikhs, and all the rest are still lining up to have a word with me for my insensitive view that we are bound by the truth alone.

Alas, the revelation that the electoral register has been hacked doesn’t change the fact that people have been probing my personal connections for months. Just as they have been taking notes, so have I. I have a very clear idea of the information they have gleaned about me. Not that it has ever really been a secret; I’ve left far too much detritus in my wake to ever be truly anonymous. Damn it, you’ve got me.

So here I remain alert: to cyber criminals who may be trying to socially engineer the next big hack; to extremists of every shade looking for their next target; to activists looking for a new cause to take up; to bored trolls looking for new prey. Alert, but hopefully not quite so stressed as I was on Friday, when I momentarily convinced myself it was time to vanish, leaving this public writing malarky for good. Alert, in the way that we all now have to be alert, but relieved that we’re all in this together.

If the worst comes to the worst, we can all just quit the internet and live off the land instead. Treat my panic attack on Friday as a drill, and try to learn lessons from it. I know I have learned my own. Much like the Electoral Commission in their state of panic, I have begun to put my own mitigations in place. I suggest you do the same.