The Most Important Thing I've Learned From Getting HACKED!!

in #mapsters7 years ago (edited)

i got hacked.jpg

OMG

These have been the most thrilling 48 hours in my SteemIt career. I’m still shaking... My account got hacked, I was locked out, while the hackers took my SBD, undid all my delegations and started powering down. It was a terrifying race against the clock to see if I could regain access to my account, and all my funds, before they managed to steal it all.

A Little Background Information


As you may or may not know, I started my SteemIt adventure with the username @mike314-005. Right, I don’t know what I was thinking signing up with that name. ;0)


By the time I had reached a reputation score of 51 and got around 500 followers, I decided I needed a different username if I wanted to get somewhere on this platform.

So I used Blocktrades to create a brand new account with the username @simplymike.

I didn’t close the old account, but decided to delegate all my SP to the new account. With that delegation, an extra investment and a lot of blood, sweat and tears, I managed to grow the @simplymike account to reach a reputation score of 53 in only 45 days.

I was pretty proud of this achievement, to be honest.

GrumpyCat

The day before yesterday, disaster struck...

I received a comment on one of my posts, in which was mentioned I received a GrumpyCat flag for using ‘the wrong bots’. I had seen these things around before, so I didn’t think much of it.

grumpycat.png

Please note that the @grumpycat account had nothing to do with the hack. The hackers simply imitated the comment, knowing people wouldn't be very suspicious because they had seen it before.

Since I had not paid for any bot, I replied to the comment, telling the posters they should reprogram their bot, because it was wrong.

I thought it would probably be a good idea to leave a comment on one of the poster’s articles instead of the flag-comment, so I clicked the ‘Learn More’ link.

SteemIt had been acting up these last couple of days, so I wasn’t really surprised when I was asked to log in after clicking the link. I did, and was redirected to a post by @grumpycat. Nothing weird about that...

wrong.gif

They Tricked Me

I didn’t realize something was wrong until I tried to post a comment to the article. The system told me I had no permission to post.

Strange, but since SteemIt can be unpredictable sometimes, I still didn’t worry. I tried my phone... wouldn’t work. I tried my tablet... nope. When I tried to log in to Busy.org and that wouldn’t work either, I realized something was terribly wrong...

On top of that, I started to receive notifications through my Steemify app which indicated that my account was posting ‘GrumpyCat flag-comments’ on other accounts.

This was bad... really bad...

I Ran Home


I didn’t really know where to go, so I stopped by the Steemcleaners channel on Discord to notify them,and then to the one place I could think of: the #newbieresteemday Discord channel, which I, surprisingly or not, considered as ‘home’.


I was very fortunate I bumped into a couple of bulldogs there, you know, the kind of people who bite something and won’t let go until they’ve done everything they could to solve it... @deliberator, @penderis, @wilfredn, @bashadow, ... thanks for your help and support, I owe you!

Nuked

Suddenly, I saw my reputation score get back to -1. I was freaking out: I had worked so hard for that rep of 53...

Because the hackers were using my account to send out phishing comments, @guiltyparties had nuked it by flagging all those comments, just to make sure the comments would be hidden and the phising attack wouldn’t make more victims.

It was just a precaution measure...

nuclear-2123685_640.jpg

Power Down

Meanwhile, the hackers had started to power down my account.

If it wasn’t for the SteemIt rule that a power down takes 7 days to be executed, I would have lost a lot of money in this.

Now, all the hackers got away with was a little over 14SBD, which is peanuts considering what it could have been.

Lessons Learned

It took a little less than 24 hours to regain control over my account, so this story has a happy ending.

It’s a bit unfortunate that it took such a dramatic event to learn some very important things.

I’ll be discussing everything I learned during this attack in my next couple of posts, but there is one thing I already want to share with you:

NEVER, EVER use your ‘Master Password’ for daily logins!!

never.gif

Like @rycharde from the M-A-P channel stated:

The Password is your "ultra secret never to be revealed master key to the steem universe"

I did read the FAQ, but I managed to miss that part, and I’m pretty sure a lot of you have too.

Save your master password and keep it somewhere safe.

Only log into your account using the key with the appropriate permissions for what you are doing:

  • Posting key for every day logins
  • Active key when necessary for transfers, power ups, etc.
  • Master password or owner key when changing the password

Again, save your master password and keep it safe! If logging in with your post key, make sure you don't overwrite or misplace your original master password.

Find it in the FAQ here

I’ll be writing a more detailed guide soon, but I thought this was too important to leave out at this point.

If I had used my private posting key to log in, the hackers would only have been able to post the phising comments, but my money would have been save.

A Word Of Thanks

So, this story has a happy ending, but that was only thanks to the help of a lot of other people.

So, I’d like to put a couple of those in the spotlight below.

Thanks for jumping on and helping out, guys (and gals ;0) ). I couldn’t have done this without you!

thanks.gif

Loads of thanks to

@deliberator, @penderis, @wilfredn, @bashadow from #newbieresteemday who jumped on it like a dog on a bone, supporting me all the way through.

@guiltyparties, @stresskiller and @pjau over at Steemcleaners for the info and @patrice for undoing all the flags, re-instating my precious rep score.

@drakos over at the help channel on SteemIt Chat for taking the time to reply and to tell the guys over at Blocktrades they needed to act! If it weren’t for you, @drakos, I would still be sending emails to them telling them they should be providing a way to recover my account.

Dan from @Blocktrades, for stepping up and initiating the recovery process.

@rycharde from #mapsters for all the useful info

@anupbose and @kobusu, for using their resteem service to get out the word about the phishing attack, by resteeming a message I created on my old account, even though I didn’t have any money in that account to pay them with.

The guys and gals over at the #alldutch community and of course @davemmccoy for the moral support.

And everyone else who supported me to get through this. There were moments I lost hope and wanted to quit and forget about SteemIt alltogether, but thanks to everyone who chipped in (like @mudcat36, who resteemed all my visible post to help me get back on my feet), I got through.

This was another example of how strong the SteemIt community really is, and a reminder why I love it so much.

This event allowed me to meet new community members, as well as get to know some members better. Together with the lessons I learned this has been a valuable experience, which fortunately turned out fine!


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Grumpycat screenshot taken from one of @grumpycat's comments

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I was shocked and confused when I saw your rep in the negatives on one of our contests. I immediately started digging who was downvoting you. And it was then when I came to know that you were hacked. I wanted to reach out to you but had no idea how to go about it. Glad you are back!

May be you should share your story of how you got back your account and the process you had to go through. Just in case, someone else face the same issue they would know how to go about it and would take less time to recover.

Again, glad to have you back.

Thanks!
I am planning to, since I was surprised about how little I knew about the support system. I am glad other people knew more about it than I did.
I don’t hang out on Discord much, but I was very thankful it existed, because it gave me a way to reach out to people...

Wowzer. What a wild ride @simplymike!

  • I can't imagine and hope to never find out what you just went through.

Still learning about Steemit...

  • You can use blocktrades to create a new account?
    • Why did you have to go back to them instead of Steemit, for account recovery?
      • Thanks in advance...

The trustee for stolen account recovery should always be a person to whom you can "prove" you are the real account owner. If you create an account via Steemit, they collect info to know who you are so that you can prove ownership later. If you create an account through BlockTrades while logged into your BlockTrades account, you can prove you are the account owner by showing you control the email account associated with your BlockTrades account. So the recovery agent is generally set to be whoever creates the account for you, since account creation often requires collecting info that can be later be used for proof-of-identity.

Note: if you buy a Steem account from BlockTrades when you are not logged into your BlockTrades account, then we don't collect proof-of-identity, and we can't help with stolen account recovery in such cases.

Thanks @blocktrades. That makes sense.

  • I've looked at your website and do not see where you can create a new account.
    • Could you point that out to me, please?
      • Thanks in advance...

I'm interested in creating an account for my pastor.

  • I'm thinking of posting some of his sermons, hoping to create a passive retirement income for him.
    • So, I'm not just a curious george, I'm actually going to create a new account... (someday soon...)

Under Steem menu at the top of page, you should see option to "Create Steem Account". I recommend you first create an account on BlockTrades and login, so that the account can benefit from stolen account recovery feature, for example.

Just a thought: shouldn’t it be a precaution measure to not allow people to create a SteemIt account if they’re not logged into their Blocktrades account?
To be honest, I sometimes forget to check if I’m logged in when using the Blocktrades services...
Fortunately I was during the creation of my account or I would have lost a lot...

We're adding an additional warning about the recovery issue on the account creation page for cases where the user isn't logged in. We'll still allow it, but the warning will make sure the customer knows the risk of not logging into their BlockTrades account first.

On Blocktrades, you can indeed choose to buy a Steem account. You can read more about it in this post.

I’m not 100% sure of the entire reason for having to go there, but one poknt for example is that if you go through the SteemIt account recovery process, you are asked for an email address thzt is attached to your account, while you don’t need an email address when buying an acccount through Blocktrades, so you can’t be sent recovery details

Aha!

  • Thanks @simplymike
    • I had looked under that menu and simply did not see it.
      • Good thing it wasn't a 🐍 snake
        it would've bit me haha

Your post was resteem by Whale ResteemService @booster007 & @boostupvote
Resteem Over 10,200+ Followers

Keep it up!
All the best!

Send 0.100 SBD/steem For resteem over 4300+ followers / send 0.200 SBD/steem resteem over 10,200+ Follwers Send your link in memo ! @boostupvote Attached !

Glad you got your account back. I too was mislead once in the beginning of my steemit life and was lucky to have found people to help me. @darkos definitely active on steem chat. Great ending there and happy you got most of you assets back.

Even now I think I can easily get tricked with links so always be vigilant. Thanks.

Thanks.
And I agree that it is easy to be tricked. It was only yesterday that I found out it is so easy to mis-read a username... you should be alert every second of the day

totally agreed. Even my own account when I login I sometimes mis spell it and think I got it stolen again. Sooner or later that may give me a heart attack. lol.

SO glad you had so many people helping you with this issue!

Terribly sad that people are preying on members too.

There’s a lot of money going around on SteemIt, which makes it a perfect target...

So true... if people would put all that energy into doing good and positive in the world versus stealing from others...

I agree, but I guess that’s not going to happen any time soon.... :0(

Like a million other people I have been following your story for the last couple of days. Thanks for taking the time to record everything in a post so the rest of us can learn. Fwiw, because of your nasty experience I devised a much better system for saving my keys. I now have a flash drive near my workspace that I can pop in when I need the active and owner keys.

Good thinking!
Better be safe than sorry!! ;0)

Wow, what a story. I can feel the pain this must have caused you. Maybe you can write a howto article for people who will be hacked in the future?

Glad to have you back :)

I’m planning to.
One if the things learned is that the help-system is not clear here on SteemIt. I simply didn’t know where to go. That shouldn’t be the case...

I am glad all is well. A post on how to get the help with recovery would be great. When you get it done, I am going to save it on my master post and name it something real long so I always carry it forward like all the Authors I like to read.

So glad it all got figured out and so quickly too! Thanks for putting the message out there for people to be careful. With this post Im sure youve helped many people from getting their accounts hacked as well. Upvoted and resteemed to spread the message! Thanks :)

Thanks!
I’m planning to get a couple of more posts out about the thingd I’ve learned from this

Great way to turn a dreadful situation into something positive! :)

Spam is discouraged by the community, including comment spam.

Tips to avoid being flagged

Thank You! ⚜

Members Of Our Community Use Our Tag To Receive Minnow Support From The Community. Your Posts Are Spam Actually. Our Posts Are Requested By Members. Where your automated response is spamming things that may not be spam. lol

Congrats from @anupbose to you for get back your account

Thanks. And thanks again for resteeming! That reminds me... I’ll send you the SBD right away :0)

No need to send sbd ..... We will be frnds and help each other to grow on steemit

too late :0D
Consider it a gift, then. From one friend to another