3 days ago I woke up to a very unwelcome event. I had 3 emails in a row that all arrived in the same minute and of course I was asleep, not that it would have mattered since they arrived within seconds of one another. Perhaps this has happened to you and to be honest when i first saw the emails I just presumed it was spam.
The emails all arrived in rapid succession indicating that a new device logged in, then that my password has been changed, and lastly that my email has been changed. Obviously this is not something I want to have happen but still thought it was a phishing scam so I tried to log into Netflix on my phone and found that I couldn't. uh-oh..
Thankfully, Netflix's customer service is really fast and easy once you finally break down and make a phone call. Like most people I don't like making phone calls and would prefer to do online chat if possible - however even though the online Netflix chat said my wait time was approximately 1 minute, I sat there for at least 20 minutes and nothing happened. Thankfully the list of international numbers was massive so the call I made wasn't long distance. The woman who answered took care of the problem very quickly and I had restored my access in just a few minutes.
However, the fact that this happened to me made me worry.... a LOT.
You see, i am extremely careful with my online data. I use a lot of precautions to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening but because it happened on Netflix I was concerned that some of my other, far more important online stuff and especially any financial information, might be compromised as well. Therefore, I spent the entire morning changing all of my stuff. All my passwords, all my 2FA, everything. Obviously this took some time.
Like most people I don't even remember all my passwords or even all of the sites that I use and thankfully LastPass remembers all of this stuff for me. This is where something magical happened or at least a rather large "silver lining" on the really annoying cloud I had to deal with.
As I was digging through the LastPass list of all sites that i had stored information about and come across one that I hadn't thought about in a very long time. It was a wallet/exchange website. Which one it was isn't important but years ago I consolidated all of my crypto wallet and exchange accounts - or so I had thought. However, since many of my passwords are quite similar I figured I would rather be safe than sorry and change the information in there as well.
I went to this website to enter my login expecting it to not go anywhere because I presumed I had shut all of those down years ago, only to discover that my login still worked. Like most websites their interface was massive and complicated so it took a while to find where the settings were and that is when I noticed something that made this Netflix hack all worthwhile.
This was a time when I had no idea how Bitcoin worked and this nice fella helped get me set up. This was my only account at the time and to be honest we never did have very many customers who attempted to use them as payment. However, some people did use them and this is where they had been stored..... and they were still there
Apparently, during the past 5 years the use of Bitcoin at my establishment was so infrequent that I forgot we ever had a few customers who used them, and the payments that they made to me were still in this wallet. Therefore, I found .83 BTC that I didn't know that I even had. Obviously, this made me very happy
I kind of remember accepting the BTC at my guesthouse many years ago and the dude only stayed with us for a few days. He was attempting to travel around the world using only BTC and my place was one of the only places in the south of Thailand that accepted them. Therefore, this dude bought EVERYTHING from us. He only stayed for a few days but in the end he paid us the .83 BTC. Well, here we are a few years later and that payment, which was probably just a couple hundred dollars at the time is now worth considerably more.
The point of the story is, if my Netflix had not been hacked I likely wouldn't have even dug through this list and noticed a crypto exchange that I haven't used at all in years (I haven't actually EVER actively used it.) Therefore I just want to give a shoutout to the a-hole in South Korea that briefly had access to my Netflix account and say.... Thanks pal!
