Over the last 24 hours, I experienced what I hope none of you who read this ever will. Someone else accessed my account, changed my keys, and withdrew 493 STEEM that I had just sent over from Bittrex. All done within minutes after my initial, terrible, mistake when making a transfer to Steemit from Bittrex. It was really gut-wrenching to helplessly see someone else start the powering down of my Steem Power without being able to stop it.
Luckily enough, the account recovery happened swiftly enough that I could change my keys again before any further damage was done (Although it did keep me up all night refreshing the email). Although I know there are many who have paid far greater prices for lessons learned in life, both physical and monetary, the completely unnecessary loss of 493 STEEM remains just as frustrating.
So what do we do when things simply suck and we feel beaten down? Well, I have always felt clever saying the following words to my own friends when they hit the wall:
The most useful ability you can have in life is the ability to turn frustration into motivation.
After all, if you want to succeed you’ll have to take on risk and with risk comes losses. What characterises those who succeed, more than anything else in my mind, is the ability to get quickly back up from the downs, to turn them into valuable lessons, and give life a punch back in return. To look at yourself and say "alright, this sucked. A lot. But what would suck even more is if additional losses are made by allowing this to further wear me down, to further distort my focus."
quote by Tomy Robbins, Entrepreneur, author and life coach image source
I guess it's time to live up to my own fancy words. The human mind is an interesting thing. It can look at the mistakes of the past, and serve you regret and pain, or it can look at the opportunities of the future, and serve you passion, purpose and drive. Why not choose the latter?
I certainly will. This experience was terrible. Gut-wrenching. But there’s an opportunity there to let that frustration fuel my motivation to do better trades, write better posts, and build stronger relationships steemit than ever. After all:
We are traders, and we are steemians.
Thank you also to all the great people on @steemspeak discord, the @steemSTEM community and a number of people on steem.chat for helping me quickly perform the right actions in response to what happened, you know who you are. Thank you in particular to @illestbambi who immediately after I had informed our Discord channel of my situation, went on to publish an article on how to protect one's account. Both to help others avoid the same trap, and promising to help me recover some of my loss with its rewards. I hope you will check it out alongside his other material.
Although mostly a terrible experience, it also served as proof of the value the community around STEEM has. It is perhaps this, more than anything else, that make me believe that STEEM is destined for the Moon. And also why I am so happy to be part of a collective effort to make this platform increasingly awesome!
Take care everyone,
Fredrik / @Fredrikaa
How did this happen? How did somebody access your account and keys and how could you prevent this from happening again?
@illestbambi made a very useful post about the whole ordeal that answers all of your questions, @fredrikaa himself linked to it in his post above:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@illestbambi/keep-you-account-secure-must-read-for-new-users
I appreciate that, ty. I am still curious how the account and keys were accessed in the first place? Seems crazy.
Yeah someone did a post about a whitehat hack they did, basically be careful about the public memo space. If you accidentally put your password in there, change it immediately!
Cryptogee
Hello @decentralization and thank you for your comment and for taking the time to read my post.
I really did two mistakes:
10 minutes later someone had spotted my error, changed all my keys, and sent the 493 STEEM I had just received to Blocktrades. At least I got my Account Recovery done very quickly, mostly thanks to a good community here helping me reach the right individuals, and knowing some myself that could help.
Anyhow, it was really awful, and I just hope I can help others not do the same grave mistake in the future.
That's awful. I'm sorry to hear that happened to you. It must have been very frustrating watching helplessly as it happened.
I have thankfully not had anything like that happen to me (except having a fraudulent charge or two on a credit card which is pretty easily fixed).
I do, however, completely agree about turning frustration into motivation. Currently I'm turning my frustration with a job I'm fed up with and have been for awhile into a relentless quest to start my own business ventures. Most will take at least a few years to really start generating income but as long as I see light at the end of the tunnel I'm just gonna keep on working towards self employment.
Steemit is a very small part of this plan and I'm not relying on it but I am here for the long term in hopes that someday this platform will explode in user numbers and the currency value will increase tremendously. It's more of a lotto ticket in comparison to my other plans. But sometimes those do pay off...
Thanks for sharing your experience.
Woahhh, well, nevermind, you can make it up in a day if this post gets enough recognition!
Another good, similar entrepreneurial quote by the richest man in China, Jack Ma after failing his exams, failing to get a job at KFC, failed at his college entrance exam, tried for harvard anyway, failed ten times, rejected from 30 jobs, and failed to get funding for his business: 'Rejection breeds obsession.'
His frustration was turned around, and he has since created the most successful company on the continent, Alibaba, and is now going global.
That would be nice ^^ although would probably take 10 posts like this to get it all back. Which of course then involves time spent which would have then instead resulted in other posts...
Yeah, we all have some moments like this. It's all about how you proceed.
I'm happy you have control of your account again. It can be frustrating and a lot to deal with someone stealing some your funds but it's a valuable lesson learned and now you're better for it. Your situation can help others from experiencing the same situation you went through so this type of information is way more valuable than the STEEM that was stolen from you.
Thank you for sharing your experience.
Thank you mate. Lets hope you're right. It's always better to take on expensive lessons when you don't have that much money on the line. Better now than later :)
@fredrikaa, I was a bit afraid that this incident would leave a bitter taste in your mouth and deter you from participating in Steemit, but I am very happy to see that you not only had the mental resilience to bounce back immediately, but also used this experience both as a motivator for yourself and as a useful warning for all of us.
I think it won't be long until you recover from the loss, your contributions here are very valued. Best luck and keep up the great work!
Thank you @irime :) I'm very happy to be here. This loss does nothing to reduce how positive I am about steemit and the warm feelings I get from getting feedbacks on my posts from people like you. So no reason to sob, but rather to make up for some losses by being even more positive ;)
Lets hope so!
I really like your Mindset @fredrikaa :) Sh*t happens but you always got the choice whether to stay down or whether you get up again!
Thank you @steembusiness . Well yeah, life only goes one way, forward. So with or without a loss like that, one can only look forward to the next opportunity, and be even more keen on taking that properly :)
Happy to see you back and with good spirits! I hope the shock is covered in the next days with the usual steemit great experience
Thank you metabs for saying that.
Yes I am going to go back in even harder than before. No reason to spend time crying over spilt milk. Losing 493 steem into thin air is depressing though as I can't get that back now.
Sorry to hear what happened to you, but I'm glad you recover your account.
In life, is not what happens to us, it's how we react!
That literally sucks soooo bad>>
It's definitely an experience nobody would like to have. I'm glad you managed to recover your account quickly before you had ant bigger losses. It's cool to see others helping immediately after it happened.
so, like, how did it happen/some get your password?? damn
https://steemit.com/steemit/@illestbambi/keep-you-account-secure-must-read-for-new-users
Wow, it exposes the dangers of the digital economy. Many ways that assets can be hijacked or evaporated in this new paradigm. Glad you were able to regain control of your account.
That's awful. I'm so sorry this happened - it's like a major cause of ongoing concern for me. It might be worthwhile making a second post that details how the breach occurred - explaining the mistake might help others prevent it themselves.
Hopefully you never repeat that mistake
Sorry to hear about your lose. But at least you were able to recover it. I too had a similar incident happen recently. All we can do is learn from our mistakes and move forward into motivation. Stay positive.
That's a horrible and scary experience, @fredrikaa... I'm glad you got the "hole patched" quickly... but even so, I can't even imagine.
Man, that sucks. I heard the news yesterday. One can but wonder just how scary it must have been. Hope you do well from now on. Lessons are learned in this wild west like environment.
meep
Sorry for the loss, whoever did that is gonna pay darely soonest...
So good to hear you were able to recover your account so swiftly brother. I take it that further powering down the remainder of your steempower was thus prevented ?
Also really 'up top' to see you twisting this sour lemon into beautiful sweet lemonade man. Cu on discord Steemspeak. Full Steem Ahead.
Any idea how they stole your password?
Everybody faces frustration in his life, it does not mean that we are over and nothing cannot be changed.
This happened to me but fortunately @gtg sent out a warning and for that, I'm forever grateful! Even though you can't power down with a private memo key, I saw I had posted in my wallet for all to see. I, of course, changed all keys.
What I really appreciate about this post is that it points to https://steemit.com/steemit/@illestbambi/keep-you-account-secure-must-read-for-new-users which offers step by step instructions how to properly send Steem into our account from Bittrex. I didn't know I could leave the memo field blank.
Thank you! And you attitude is amazing. I hope you earn all your losses back from upvotes. 😃
Oh man, I missed this, that sucks big time! Just glad you got it back and are now in full control again!
Cryptogee
Sorry to hear this happened to you mate :( How lucky that you were able to recover the account! I thought lost passwords were unrecoverable here.
Oh my god. I even did not know it can happen and thank you for sharing your story so we can learn. I liked the way you look to your life seeing this as an expensive, but the lesson you learned. I think this is the only way to success in life although you are right - the time you are in - it is hard to see it is this way. But I am sure you will recover quite quickly with such a great content you publish! Good luck and big thank you for sharing. if it was not you I might have been the next%(
My first questions were like @decentralization 's above. Initially I thought a hacker just somehow magically gained access to your account. But I see from your response to @decentralization you made some rather big mistakes. But even then, how quickly someone was able to take advantage of this mistake of yours, is rather chilling.
People often say that, but actually brooding on the problem long-term might give you more insights. A person who fell ill, then jumped right back up to his feet after his illness went away, would probably not search for a cure for the next time this happened.
Upboat is a friendly half-human, half-robot which hopes to help promote the better posts of Steemit by trying to ensure they get the recognition they deserve.
@UPBOAT looks for numerous signals before deciding on who to UPBOAT and is likely to summon our robot friends to share some robot love with you to show affection.
I'VE BEEN AT SEA FOR 4 DAYS AND HAVE GIVEN 110 UPBOATS! PLEASE HELP @UPBOAT STAY AFLOAT ON THE STEEMIAN SEAS BY DELEGATING SPARE SP OR PATCH WATER LEAKS BY UPBOATING.
great work... keep it up
i have upvoted you and following you now..
follow back and upvote on my interseting posts which i have posted recently...
:)
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However, doing what you're doing is more likely to get your account flagged. This is NOT how you build a valuable following on Steemit...