I was hacked :(
My reputation score went from 27 to -1! I'm still fairly new here, trying to post quality stuff and make comments that have substance, yet someone felt the need to hack my account?!
Image credit: geek.ng
Are you kidding me?!
How am I supposed to fix the damage done to my account?
So apparantly 2 days ago my account was hacked. My first red flag was when I attempted to login and it kept saying 'incorrect password', even though I knew I had written down my password PERFECTLY. I'm meticulous about things like that, especially for an account such as this, where if you lose your password you're shit out of luck.
So I began the stolen account / recovery process.
Apparantly someone posted dozens of spamming comments from my account along with phishing links. SO MANY! I don't even know where to start to try to fix all this!
If anyone reading this is someone who got a comment from "me" that was spammy or whatever, please accept my apology for the rude person who did that. I wish there was a way to figure out who did all this from my account, and I hope anyone who reads this knows that I've made a great deal of effort to only post comments that are of quality or at least add to the conversation.
If anyone can give me any suggestions on how to fix the damage done to my account and reputation score, it would be appreciated.
Upvoted you to help your post get out of the hidden zone.
That will help a bit with your reputation too.
Did you change your access?
Make sure when you connect to steemit to connect to the right URL ... never click on any link to be redirected here, and double check the URL ... millions of people make that mistake all the time.
Thank you @mandl , I appreciate that, very kind of you :) I'm working on it, just learned there's all sorts of different passwords / keys. A little confusing at first. But I'm learning.
Yea I'm going to be pretty paranoid about absolutely everything I click on now, and will definitely make sure I always sign into the right place (in regards to the url, I never even thought of that).
I am really sorry to see what happened to you. It is clear that you are a genuine poster and someone somehow started posting on your behalf.
It is impossible to know who did this, or what their motive was. The question is how did they get your posting password? Did you use a public computer? Has your compter been hacked or is it running a key-logger? Did you lose a phone or iPad? Did you enter your posting key into an app that claimed to be part of steemit?
I see that in one of the recent replies you have been invited into a discord chat to resolve the issue. But you must first remove all the offending comments. Hurry-up. Some of them are already 6 days old. Once they are 7 days old it is too late to edit.
Good luck! I hope you get your reputation back.
Thank you @swissclive, I appreciate that. My best guess is since I would click on links to other peoples' articles (like in comment sections) and / or sites people claimed to be helpful for success on steemit, it must have somehow happened that way :(
I edited the comments / got rid of all the links the hacker posted, so hopefully that helps. There was about 100 spammy comments from this stupid hacker, so it was super time-consuming. Yeah four different people gave me some very helpful info on steemit chat, that was awesome.
I hope no one else fell victim to this hacker :( But I'll tell you what, this gal won't be clicking on anymore links! Thanks, hope I can get my reputation back too.
There is a way to recover your account. I have been hacked too. I got my account recovered and my reputation score back up.
You need to edit all the phishing comments that have been posted from your account. Replace the text by ‘comment deleted’. Then contact Steemcleaners at Discord to remove the flags.
Reply to this comment and I will guide you through
Thanks @simplymike , that gives me hope - if you were able to recover and get your score all the way up to a 54, that's awesome. I'm wondering though how I go about getting my first two posts visible again, because I would like people to be able to see my intro post, get to know me, ya know?
Yea I edited all the comments / removed the links the stupid hacker put in them. Took forever, but got it done.
So do I just go on by posting more quality blog posts and hope that people will give me a chance despite my low reputation score? Thanks for your help, much appreciated.
Have you contacted Steemcleaners about removing their flags?
I’ve written a detailed guide on my blog yesterday. Since you’ve already edited the comments, you can skip the first part and just head over to the Steemcleaners Discord channel, and tell them what happened, and that you’ve edited all comments. It can take a couple of hours before they reply, but they will be able to take back (most of) the flags, so your rep score will go back up again...
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