Yesterday the unthinkable happened! Video at the bottom of this post!
On July 14th, ironically enough, I was writing a blog post about Steemit being the first display of transparency in the world of social media. At the time, I was writing the blog in the notepad of my laptop because Steemit had an alert at the top that said they were doing maintenance and some features were disabled because of it. I thought not much of it. At the most I thought, "Yay, new features". But about 15 minutes into writing my blog I started to get curious as to what they were changing so I checked the slack channel and what I walked into was pure chaos.
The word "hack" and "hacked" were some of the most used words in the channel so my heart started pounding. Next I started to see "Yea, someone stole 80K worth of Steem from a list of users". Panic started to set into me. Steemit was my way out. I visioned walking into my job, quiting, and then writing a blog about it that same day all whilst making money doing so. But now it felt like the DAO all over again. No one knew exactly what was happening. Just a lot of panic and speculation. A few minutes passed and Ned, a creator of Steemit, entered the slack and said, "We will be making a statement soon.". Again, my heart sunk. That's never a good sign. Have you ever been watching CNN and seen a representative come to the podium and say "We will be making a statement soon" and it actually be good news?!? NEVER! So I new something was up. I hoped this wasn't a scam or that they were running away with money. The possibilities were endless.
Fast forward. Ned comes back to the slack and makes an announcement as to what exactly has happened. "100k in steem stolen. We're working on it blah blah.." My confidence was then starting to come back. Ok Ned and Dan aren't running away with our money everything's cool, they're working on it. So I continued to write my blog post on
transparency and posted it a few minutes later. After doing so I logged out for a reason I don't remember. I think I was trying to protect my account from being hacked. I'm not a technical person so I viewed logging off as a sort of unplugging my account from Steemit to keep it safe. So a few minutes later I tried to log back in and I got a
message saying "Your account may have been compromised, contact support at contact@steemit.com". Still not too worried, I figured everyone was getting this message so I went to slack again. "Hey am I the only one getting this message?". A user replied, "...is your username on this list?":
There it was. Smack dead in the middle. I didn't know how to feel. At first thought I panicked and took a fast trip to my wallet to see if my Steem was all there and it was. Everything looked good. Nothing missing. Huge relief. So I emailed support and after a few hours I heard from Ned that they were working on getting people their earning and accounts back but he didn't mention when so I had to wait to hear more. By that time my post about transparency had earned about $99 in its first 3 hours. I didn't know how to feel. Happy, or afraid. Part of me was excited that I could still see my earnings from the outside but a part of me was fearful and anxious. It was like being in a canoe drifting away from land with no paddle. I could see everything in my account and what was going on. But I couldn't get to it. Like being in time out during recess and watching everyone else get to play.
Fast forward to yesterday and I'm finally back. Out of my jail cell. Free to rome the feeds of steemit, upvoting and commenting at will. You can see a live minute by minute log of what I did while I was hacked here: https://steemit.com/steem/@trevonjb/my-4-day-log-of-being-hacked-on-steemit-true-story
