Twitter returns @N account to original owner
Many of you remember Naoki Hiroshima's story about how his short account @N was extorted from him . The hacker used social engineering methods in order to gain control of the account.
An attacker was able to obtain some Hiroshima credit card information from a PayPal account and used it to reset GoDaddy's account information. Then the thief changed several details related to Hiroshima's domains so that the owner could not access the information on his own site. When the hacker could not reset the password for the account, he began to extort by contacting Hiroshima and demanding to reset the password in his Twitter account.
In the end, Hiroshima gave the account to the attacker, and also notified Twitter, but the latter refused to immediately return access, citing an investigation. Later, the ill-fated account was made private and closed, but access was never restored.
The good news is that yesterday Twitter returned control of the account to its rightful owner, after almost a month.
It remains to be seen why the decision to return the account to the original owner took so long. Representatives of Twitter declined to comment, citing the privacy policy and security of private accounts. Be that as it may, this is a really pleasant ending to the story.
An attacker was able to obtain some Hiroshima credit card information from a PayPal account and used it to reset GoDaddy's account information. Then the thief changed several details related to Hiroshima's domains so that the owner could not access the information on his own site. When the hacker could not reset the password for the account, he began to extort by contacting Hiroshima and demanding to reset the password in his Twitter account.
In the end, Hiroshima gave the account to the attacker, and also notified Twitter, but the latter refused to immediately return access, citing an investigation. Later, the ill-fated account was made private and closed, but access was never restored.
The good news is that yesterday Twitter returned control of the account to its rightful owner, after almost a month.
It remains to be seen why the decision to return the account to the original owner took so long. Representatives of Twitter declined to comment, citing the privacy policy and security of private accounts. Be that as it may, this is a really pleasant ending to the story.