Hello my steemit friends!
Couple of days ago (Saturday to be exact) I opend my Steemit account. I posted introducting post right away followed by my first real post couple of hours later.
Being new to the platform, I explored a little bit and I was excited people are actually upvoting and commenting my post. As I was reading some comments on my post, I noticed someone posted a comment about how my post is plagiarism with the liknk that allegedly I coppied content from. Out of curiostiy I foolishy opened it assuming that Steemit security system is on a much higher level that it actually turned out to be.
As soon as I opened the link, I got logged out instantly and when I tried to re-log it said that my password was incorect.
I am making this post with a goal of raising awareness about phishing scams on the platform, but also to turn your attention to some details I learned the hard way.
the hacker was using a pretty simple bait. What he did is basicly putting the url to a place he wans't you to enter with using "<.a .href=.....>" commands(the same like HTML code). But the link you see says something different. In this example he made it appear as a link to one of my actual posts, or just a link to my account. The url he hid leads to a website called „sleemit(dot)com“, which looks very similar to Steemit but is used to steal passwords. (I noticed these things when I was editing the comments in order to erase the dangerous content he left)
To make things worse, he used my account to bait others after he stolen my account.
So please keep in mind that there are lot of these kinds of scams on the platform and don't click on any links unless you are 100% sure they are legit. Also if you see this little icon right after the link, be even more careful cause it says that the link is taking you away from the site(it actually says that if you hover over it as you can see in the screenshot below). The most obvious clue is if user is having 0 reputation. It usually means the account is flagged for spamming, plagiarism or phishing.
Furthermore, if you notice someone is using theese links, make sure to report him, flag him and warn other users of him.
However, if you do click on those links and get hacked(like I did), you can recover your account (also like I did).
What you need to do is start the account recovery system where you enter your username, the last password you had in possesion, and your email adress.
The next thing I highly recommend is visit steemit.chat webpage. For those who don't know, steemit chat is a site where you can chat and talk to other steemit users about a lot of topics.Every topic has it's own chat room and the good thing is that the website is not linked with steemit, so you don't need a steemit account to join.
There is a chat room called #steemitabuse where you can share your problem. I did that and got contacted by a moderator there who told me everything I need to do to recover my account.
Huge thanks to @guiltyparties, (the moderator) who helped me with the process.
After I got my new password, I had to edit(not delete) every comment the hacker posted so I remove all the phishing links.
Lastly, I would like to apologise to everyone who's accounts got endangered by a hacker through my profile and I sincerely hope no one fell for the scam like I did. But at least I learned my lesson and you learn the best on your own mistakes.
I hope you understand.
That is it for now, I will continue posting as planned, but on some much more fun topics.
Best regards.