Source: Photo by Sora Shimazaki: https://www.pexels.com/photo/unrecognizable-hacker-with-smartphone-typing-on-laptop-at-desk-5935791/
Even A Billionaire, Even the world's richest man cannot save himself from being hacked. Yes, I am talking about the Jeff Bezoz phone hacking incident.
My friend whose identity I will keep safe has been in my friend zone for over 2 decades as we used to play Command And Conquer Red Alert 3 online together a long time ago.
My friend contacted me a month ago and he told me two of his social media accounts got hijacked, his Facebook and his YouTube channel. Being an experienced YouTuber myself I went to the form and filled it up for him via the YouTube help and support section under my YouTube analytics and somehow we got his channel back live and safe with all his content up and running.
His Facebook case I emailed Facebook providing his email address a week ago but Facebook never contacted him and his Facebook account is still hacked.
Today this same friend of mine contacted me and he told me a shocking revelation that he was hacked he said the following things to me which I will segregate in a list below:
After the incident my friend contacted me and here is the list of things he did in order to protect his online trace so that the hacker cannot harm him with the data leak.
The moral of this story is quite simple the internet is not a safe place and let me tell you my own experience. In the last 3 months, three of my social media accounts have been hijacked and only 1 was retrieved successfully.
My Twitter account was hacked in June 2023 and I noticed that there was strange activity happening on it but I did have access to it later I immediately changed it to Two-factor authentication via Google authenticator to resolve the issue however even then Twitter decided to permanently ban my account and after doing countless appeals like over 10+ times it is still banned. Please help me if you have experience with this kind of ban appeal you can contact me via my business email at [email protected].
My Reddit account was hijacked in July 2023 which led the hijacker to get me banned on multiple subreddits please note that my Reddit account has over 14k+ karma and is very important for my online business so when asked in the r/help subreddit they told me to add two-factor authentication via google application through mobile so I did exactly that luckily for me my Reddit account is safe and I can easily access it.
My Hive.blog account which is a social media blogging platform powered by the hive cryptocurrency is one of the most secure platforms on the internet because it provides you a very long password that you cannot change but the hijacker I think somehow hacked into my chrome browser and my google account and somehow got hold of my master password key and requested a password changed and then got 100 percent control of that account of mine stealing away all of my valuable money. My hive.blog account is ecency.com/@liquidocelot and sadly after contacting the ecency discord team the owner of ecency called good-karma told me that my account is lost forever now. The funny thing is the hijacker named sepa666 still has hold of my account and is still taking away money from his account even after asking the ecency team to stop this from happening at least no action was taken on this.
My friend and I after doing some research also saw a similar thread posted on Microsoft Answers and the Microsoft support team told the victim that this might be a lazy attempt to scare him into giving the hacker money so never ever give him a cent even and just do a fresh Windows 10 Installation via Media creation tool into a bootable installer and to back up his data into a USB external hard drive and these steps were taken by my friend as well so maybe not panicking is a great way if you find your self in a similar situation.
My final message to you all is do not and I mean do not click on phishing links whatsoever no matter how trustworthy they look or how much reputation they hold please be very vigilant online and in the end am going to share a video tutorial on this exact topic.
This article was originally published on medium which is legally my content.
Special thanks to @katerinaramm who suggested me to do a full hard drive scan with an AntiMalware software which I did exactly because she told me that she feared that my online activities might be in danger as well.