Naoki Hiroshima is now back in control of his valuable single-letter Twitter handle: @N.
You may recall the story of Naoki Hiroshima, a Japanese blogger whose extremely rare single-letter Twitter handle (which he valued at up to $50,000), was stolen from him by a hacker abusing PayPal and GoDaddy security flaws. We’re glad to report that, as Hiroshima himself puts it, “Order has been restored”, and Twitter has restored the stolen account to its rightful owner.
Order has been restored.— Naoki Hiroshima (@N) February 25, 2014
Twitter said it was “investigating” following Hiroshima’s publication of the incident, and did not return the handle to him right away. The @N account was made private and was later shut down, but access was not restored to Hiroshima until today.
Hiroshima’s hacker was able to gain access to his GoDaddy account using incomplete credit card information obtained from PayPal, and masquerading as an employee to the technical support consultant.
Hiroshima managed to figure out something was up when his PayPal and GoDaddy went down, and quickly changed the associated email address for his Twitter. But, at this stage, the hacker turned to extortion, claiming that he would delete all of Hiroshima’s GoDaddy domains if he didn’t turn over the username.
PayPal, of course, denied that the whole thing happened, claiming that “Our customer service agents are well trained to prevent social hacking attempts like the ones detailed in this blog post,” and GoDaddy didn’t even offer a comment.
It’s nice to see this story get a happy ending.
Source: Ars Technica
