Good morning happy Sunday.
This past week has been extremely stressful, uncomfortable and overall just strange. You may have seen from a post from me a few days ago stating I had been hacked and lost not only my hive account but various social media profiles.
I still don't quite know how the virus/hack actually happened but I have two strong theories. The first being via discord. I know full well not to click on suspicious links but one thing I didn't pay attention too was the sheer number of connections, plugins and trusted authorities I had on my discord that of course had continued to grow throughout the years when moderating and creating various discord servers for people. I read online that trusted plugins can easily be compromised and with it already being connected to your profile well you are just a sitting duck. My discord was the first thing targeted followed by my Microsoft account, X account, Instagram and Hive. I am leaning more towards discord being the blame but another theory I have been I may have downloaded something that contained a virus. I am not one to download much and why I don't fully take this theory compared to the discord one is because I had not downloaded anything to my computer in a few weeks and would only download "trusted" things but then again I read that viruses can just lay hidden in the shadows and pop up without being noticed.
Furthermore, I acted quite late to what was happening due to most of the attack happening when I was asleep and during my morning shift at work it was not until I checked discord on my phone at work when I noticed something bad was going on. I deleted the account on the spot it was just pumping out hundreds of links to people and joining various servers that it would be easier to just delete the account and its data. I eventually got home and decided to start the pc and then realised my X, Instagram and various social logins had been compromised, fearing the worst I disconnected the Wi-Fi and began factory resetting the computer installing windows completely fresh and having it reboot like a new computer. I reset my passwords for everything I could think of and also deleted some social media and platforms I no longer wished to use.
Likewise, I changed my banking details too, but the worst was yet to come. I lost access to my keys during the attack, which has made getting back into my account a real struggle. Anyone familiar with Hive knows just how important those keys are, and without them, regaining access isn't as simple as resetting a password like you would on a traditional social media platform. I checked out all the recovery options but annoyingly none of them worked for me and for half of the week my account was a lost cause, gone for good. Until . . . I found my old phone I realised that maybe just perhaps I am still logged in on that device. To my absolute delight I was, in fact, logged in on the hive blog browser and although stupid but also thankful I had logged in with my master key (do not do this) but for me although terrible it saved my account. Having already established a log in I was able to click reveal keys on all my keys and realised they had, in fact, been changed, and so I took the liberty of not only changing them all once but 5 different times just to make for certain.
Going forward it is clear I need to take cybersecurity and protecting things more seriously. And also be wary of downloads and discord.
I will wrap up this post here I am thrilled just to have my hive account back that was so stressful seeing that potentially disappear. as for my other social media platforms I am not too fussed if anything it gave me a reason to cut down on some and therefore allowing me to focus on important ones like Hive. Thanks for reading.