^{Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash}
What a crazy couple of weeks it's been.🤯🤯🤯
It took me by surprise, but yes, even I... an IT professional got hacked a little while ago and almost lost my personal #steemit account. After losing our original company account (@yemsgroup) some years ago, the hack began with and I lost our recreated company account @yems.group.😭😭😭 I would have lost my personal account as well if not thanks to the vigilance of steem Representative @chant and @steem-cameroon admin @fombae who have been doing an incredible job in ensuring that #steemit stays active and relevant in Bamenda and in Cameroon as a whole through the @steem-cameroon community.

Kudos to you guys! @chant and @fombae 🥳🥳🙌🏿🙌🏿

how it happened

A few weeks ago, @chant noticed that our company account @yems.group had completed a #powerdown and since this is not something that we usually do as our goal has always been to #powerup all of our accounts, she notified @fombae who then got to me to verify whether I was the one who initiated it. Unfortunately, we all only realised this long after the hacker powered down and transferred all of the account's steem to himself.

Lucky for me, when he hacked into my account and removed my SP delegation to @steem-cameroon, @chant quickly noticed this and alerted me. That was when we realized my account had also been hacked, all keys changed and a #powerdown had been initiated. Since this activity had happened within the 30-day period where the #steemit security admins can help out, she immediately got to work trying to help me recover the account.

what we did.

^{Screenshot from my computer desktop}
The very first thing we did was to visit the Accounts Recovery page on steemit.com and submit an Account Recovery Request.

• Note that, that as stated on the link, Stolen Account Recovery gives the rightful account owner 30 days to recover their account from the moment the thief changed their owner key.
• This also means that you'll need to know your last active owner key in order to get support.
• This process will take an average of 1 to 2 weeks.

After submitting this request, @chant and @fombae enlisted the help of @el-nailul who joined them to work tirelessly to get the attention the steemit team for them to approve my account recovery process. I was really lucky to have been in touch with these SR who sacrificed their time and effort in ensuring that I got my account back.

Thankfully, my account recovery process was finally approved and I was able to recover my account and stop the powerdown process the hacker has initiated. This unfortunately also means that I did manage to lose the first week's powerdown and my previous company accounts @yemsgroup and @yems.group.

It is important to note that this hacker seems to be gaining access only to dormant accounts and so I'll like to encourage other steemians to

• Take their #steemit journeys seriously and ensure their accounts are always active
• Take digital security even more seriously and avoid clicking on any funny links

...and if they ever notice anything fishy on their accounts, they should reach out to their SRs like @chant and @fombae for help.

I remain very grateful and am looking forward to resuming my steemit activities in full force.