I am back into my account! I think the social pressure helped, so thanks to EVERYONE who has been sharing my story.
Next up, restoring my Twitter profile, including the content. This looks promising:
@ruby for sale
A few people now have contacted me about the hacker forum where my Twitter name (with no tweets and no followers) is now available for the low, low price of $70!
You have to register on the forum to see it, but the URL is http://www.hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=3508538 in case you’re curious.
My friend Christina actually logged in. She says the person selling it presents as a 17 year old male form NY, and he says the person who hacked me traded the ID to him. Then my friend Jackson also logged in to the forum and took these amazing screenshots:
Really, Twitter?
You don’t think you can do anything about this? Cause you’re not sure if the account maybe doesn’t belong to the person in control of it? Really???
Thanks to Travis C for the tip about the new Twitter bio.
In case anyone is curious, I’m not going to buy my own account back from some juvenile criminal. Twitter needs to do right and restore this account properly.
Thawing at Dreamhost?
Are they getting sick of my complaining e-mails or is the social pressure working? I don’t know but this evening Dreamhost offered me a different way to authenticate myself, which I have now done! It will be hours before they reply of course, if not more.
I also spent some time rifling through all my old credit card bills and I couldn’t find any with Dreamhost charges on them. In fact, I thought I was paying them through PayPal. It’s been years since I fiddled with that account.
Tickets, please
A few folks have asked for my support ticket numbers with Twitter and Dreamhost to follow up. I’m a little nervous about posting them publicly as the hacker might try to engineer that against me.
If you have a contact at either company and would like the ticket number, either comment on this post and I’ll reply to you at the e-mail on your Disqus account, or use Tumblr’s Ask-me-a-question thingy and I’ll send them privately (if I know you).
One last try
Hello, friends. Many of you have helped me by reaching out to your personal contacts who work at Twitter or Dreamhost, and some have even written angry letters to them. I appreciate this support. Although it hasn’t had any visible impact yet, there must be a point at which it can break through the wall.
I can understand that they don’t know if I’m really me, but many of you actually know me. You are friends here in NC, you are colleagues in nonprofit tech, and you have been following me on Twitter for 6 years or more. And you know that I would never do this:
When my account used to look almost like this (the screenshot was taken after the hacking started, but before the account was wiped out):
As I posted earlier, my next step is going to be contacting the FBI and it really does not sound like fun. I can barely keep up with my life as it is (family, job, changing passwords on every account ever, etc.) without making a campaign out of this, so I need your help. I’d like to ask everyone to make one last attempt to reach some human beings at Twitter and especially at Dreamhost. Even if you don’t know anyone who can intervene directly, just retweet/share the link to this page.
Background:
Ever since reading last year about the epic hacking of Mat Honan , all for his short Twitter ID “@Mat” I have been worried the same thing might happen to me. Fortunately, I haven’t handed over quite as much of my life to Apple as Mat had done. But I still get nervous whenever people try to hack into my Twitter account, which has been tried repeatedly. Twitter has always ignored my requests for attention to this.
That shit did hit the fan this weekend. I managed to restore several key accounts and nothing has been irreversibly damaged that I know of (yet). However, I am still locked out of Twitter and even worse my entire Dreamhost account (including domain names, e-mail addresses, and web sites) are in the hands of my hacker.
- You can see the evolving saga on my “hacked” tag.
- My first post explains a lot.
- And a screenshot of my old account before it was deleted but after it was hacked, makes the hack pretty clear.
What a helpful FAQ from the FBI! All questions lead to the exact same non-answer.
Next stop: Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)
Lalitree is the bomb
@lalitree My friend who works at Twitter says he will get Support on it.
Kathryn Yu Catch 22
So Twitter will only respond to ruby@lotusmedia.org, which was associated with @ruby. The hackers changed @ruby to @notrubyyo, and then deleted it. Who knows what address they have associated with the new @ruby account?
My Dreamhost account (which includes lotusmedia.org DNS) has been hacked and they are also not talking to me because I haven’t successfully proven who I am to them. (Only their customer of about 12 years.) Their password reset only uses e-mail, no security questions or SMS back up.
Dreamhost are also much slower to respond when they think I’m not a customer so it’s taking forever to get anywhere, and they refuse to talk on the phone.