Hello Steemians,
As you see my account has been restored to its normal state. It has been difficult time yet I have had learned many things and benefited a lot from this situation.
What did happen?
On Wednesday I sat to check my account after getting back from work. I started logging in from my phone to find the password is incorrect. I tried several times before using the laptop, no way. After realizing I was hacked I checked my wallet to find out that my SBD has been transferred. Thankfully, tiny amount of SBD had been there.
I rushed to Stolen Account Recovery, provided my password and email to receive a message that It would take sometime. Searching Steemit for posts about account recovery I found someone who said it takes 5 days to recover your account. Shit, 5 days are too long.
Two hours later, my account started commenting on several posts claiming they are on its blacklist for plagiarism and offered links to be checked in order to know more details. In less than an hour, 60 comments were done. Sadly some posters especially those who are relatively new on Steemit panicked. They wrote comments defending themselves and arguing it is their original work.
Within that hour my hard earned reputation fell to a score of -1 which I never knew exist.
While my reputation was -1 and before recovering my account, 8 more kind people followed me. I don’t know what these guys were thinking or why some would follow someone with such reputation. Hope one of them read this post and provide me with the reason.
@barrydutton is someone with whom I have interacted a lot recently, we don’t know each other personally but steemit turns out to be a place where you can make good friends. He commented on one of my old comments wondering why I am being flagged and asked me to DM him if I needed help. I Dm’d hem telling the story.
On Thursday, Steemit Support sent me an email saying they had approved my account recovery. I followed the link in the email to Steemit where I got new password.
Finally I logged in to my account.
First thing I wrote a post about the situation and asked for advice. Here came @khackett who commented she was one that flagged me. She added that she removed the flag and provided me with a link to a post by @simplymike who has been through the same problem and finally managed to recover her account and reputation.
I commented on @simplymike’s post. I told her what happened and asked for advice. Thankfully, she responded in few minutes. She advised I had to edit all comments using Steemworld.org then contact the guys in Steemcleaners Discord Channel to ask them to remove the flags. On her advice I edited all the comments. It almost took me three hours to manually edit all of them.
While editing the comments I received an email from @barrydutton telling me he had contacted @timcliff who advised on editing the comments and contacting Steemcleaners Discord Channel. Once I was done with the comments I went to Steamcleaners and informed them that all comments been edited. @patrice showed up within minutes and told me she removed the flags.
My account is colorful again, all posts can be seen and reputation is (43), two points higher than when it was lost. Thankfully my three months hard work on Steemit haven't evaporated into air. I can now continue writing, explaining discussing and debating topics I like with people whom can’t be easily found outside Steemit.
Awesome people to thank!
I am deeply grateful for @simplymike, @barrydutton, @khackett , and @patrice for their efforts in advising and helping me out of this problem.
There are no setbacks, only benefits.
Despite the temporary losses there are many benefits I personally gained from being hacked.
The first benefit of this situation is realizing that on Steemit there are good people who are ready to offer help and advice whenever they are needed. They sincerely help for the goodness of this community.
The second benefit is learning more about how Steemit works. I have been told about Steamcleaners and Steemworld.org. I have learnt about the difference between Steemit keys and when to use each of them, which I never paid attention to. I have discovered a lot about this platform and that there is much more to discover. And finally there is a professional team behind steemit who, thankfully, is dedicated to the platform and its users.
The third and most important benefit is that I came to trust this platform more than ever, I feel more loyal to Steemit and more obliged to continue my journey here. So I am going to invest more time, effort and money in here.
Thanks, Hope everyone enjoys being a steemian as much as I do.
@alignment
I’m glad everything turned out fine and that you’ve got both your account and your reputation score back!
Sounds like you’re ready to conquer SteemIt ;0)
That really sucks @alignment, but thanks for sharing the story. I have something to refer to now in case it happens to me. Good to see you have made a quck recovery too.
Thanks for stopping by. Take care. :)
It is nice to be back, welcome
https://steemit.com/writing/@arthurjnr/the-journey-to-self-discovery-and-success
Thank You. :)
You were lucky with that, no money lost and you get you reputation score back. Were your password to simple, or did you some mistakes with some of the others keys?
There are some posts with links to sites that look like steemit, once you are there you are asked to sign in. Then they took the password and change it. take care.