Well thank goodness, at least I still have access to this! I have lost my whole site on lotusmedia.org (for now).
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 happened before. Twitter has always ignored my requests for attention to this.
That shit did hit the fan today, and while I’m still locked out of some very important accounts, nothing has been irreversibly damaged that I know of.
What happened:
At 4:15 pm today, I got an e-mail from PayPal about “How to reset your PayPal password.” I was in the car on the way to a party so I just ignored it assuming the usual e-mail authentication barrier would be adequate.
Then at 10:39 pm I got two notices from Yahoo saying my password had actually been changed. And at 10:40 pm Dreamhost (who owns my domain name, web hosting, and accounts for many friends and former clients) said “Your password has been successfully reset from the IP address 24.234.193.4.”
Not good! I can’t tell if they’ve done anything to Dreamhost because my website (lotusmedia.org) was already having technical difficulties that I just noticed yesterday. Then I go to check Twitter. Although I haven’t received any messages from them, I know this was the target in the @mat case.
Sure enough, my account has been involuntarily changed to @notrubyyo, and @ruby has been taken over (by some fool with no friends and no tweets). I still have access to all my followers, etc, but I have lost my name!
So far I have successfully reset my passwords at Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Facebook. I have not yet accessed Dreamhost, and I’m afraid to find and enter the data that I would need to get in to PayPal. I have an old Apple ID and I can’t access that either. I don’t think there’s malware on my computer, but I can’t be sure it’s not compromised.
I’ve contacted Twitter using their reporting system (as well at tweeting @ them, which never works), and have also e-mailed Dreamhost.
Just now I checked Twitter to see if there was any response, and now @notrubyyo is gone completely. I’m not sure but I think my 7 years of Twitter just got flushed down the toilet.