Hacker managed to steal rare username on the social network
Having a rare Twitter name seems to put the owner in the target of hackers, as a recent incident showed.
Naoki Hiroshima, a programmer from California, had owned the "@N" account since 2007. However, as he claims, the account was stolen by hackers!
He wrote on his blog that he had been offered $50,000 to sell his account and that they had tried to steal it from him before.
This time, however, someone managed to gain access to his GoDaddy account and changed the account settings on his personal email.
The hacker then informed Hiroshima via email that he had managed to hack into his GoDaddy account, obtaining the last four digits of his credit card number. He claimed to have done so by contacting PayPal, where Hiroshima also has an account. He then used what he described as “a few simple tactics to obtain the last four digits of the card.”.
PayPal denied that it disclosed Hiroshima's information. However, GoDaddy admitted in a statement to TechCrunch that an employee was tricked into revealing personal information to access Hiroshima's account.
Ultimately, the unfortunate man was forced to give up the "@N" account, as the hacker blackmailed him by saying he would face problems with the data and websites he maintained.
"I changed my username @N to @N_is_stolen for the first time since signing up in early 2007. This gave the hacker control of the '@N' account and Hiroshima was able to regain access to the GoDaddy account," he wrote.
As for Twitter, it has not yet returned the account to Hiroshima, but explained that it is "investigating the report.".
Source: newsbeast.gr
