Stay
#SAFU on X and other socials.
@JasonYanowitz on X narrates his
#hack odeal.
I got hacked yesterday. At the risk of looking foolish, I'll share how it happened so you can avoid this nightmare. For the past few weeks, people have been trying to get into my accounts.
#Crypto accounts, email, twitter, etc... every few days I get an email that someone is trying to access one of my accounts. Thankfully I have non-text
#2FA set up for everything so nothing got hacked. So when I got back from dinner last night and saw this email, I panicked.
Someone in North Cyprus had finally managed to hack into my account. I guess my security wasn't strong enough and they found a loophole.
I clicked the link to "secure my account". I entered my username and password, updated to a new password, and voila: I'm back in. Crisis averted. Or so I thought. Moments later, I got an email saying my email address had been changed.
This was the real hack.
I was now officially locked out of my account. So how did this happen? It turns out the original email, which looks incredibly real, was not so real. Most email clients hide the actual address.
But when you expand it, you can see that this email was sent from "verify@x-notify.com" Fake address. I got phished. Very foolish mistake. I don't open Google Docs when they're sent to me. I don't click links. I typically check addresses. But Friday 8pm after a long week, they got me. I am aware this thread exposes a pretty dumb mistake but if I can save one person from this same mistake, it's worth it.
Some takeaways:
- Don't click links
- If you do click a link, review the actual email address
- Set up non-text 2FA on everything
- If you've done that, trust your own security process
- If you think you've been hacked, slow down and think about how this could have happened
Big thank you to @KeithGrossman and some folks at X for helping me get my account back so quickly.
If you're still reading, go read the self-audit series from @samczsun.
And this best practices from @bobbyong.
Lot more you can do but start there.
#phishing