Last month, early Twitter user Naoki Hiroshima lost his rare and valuable username @N. Valued at up to $50,000, the username was stolen by a hacker who used social engineering to take over Mr. Hiroshima’s web server and email account at GoDaddy, after which he used extortion to get Mr. Hiroshima to turn over the password to the account. Fearing the loss of his websites and email accounts, Mr. Hiroshima acquiesced to the hacker’s demands and turned over access to the @N twitter account.
Despite publishing ample evidence of the entire event and requesting help from Twitter, the microblogging service surprisingly delayed taking action against the hacker for several weeks. Finally, the account was shut down, presumably by Twitter, and resurfaced late Tuesday back in the hands of Mr. Hiroshima, with a tweet that “Order has been restored.”
The entire incident was allegedly caused by lapses in security policies at PayPal, GoDaddy, and Twitter, and there were also some steps that Mr. Hiroshima could have taken to prevent or mitigate the incident. For those interested in the complete technical aspects of what likely occurred, be sure to check out Ars Technica’s overview.
Featured image via Twin Design / Shutterstock.com
