It took a few hours for the MX record change to propagate so I still received emails for a few hours. They left my existing Exchange mailbox intact, but created a new mailbox and switched the MX record to point to that mailbox. After they got control of my cell phone number, they sent themselves a reset password text message at my domain manager to get access to that.

I tried to login to my domain manager and no longer had access. I checked my regular email address and while send and receive worked with no error, no new external emails had come in for a few hours (which is unusual as I get over 200 emails per day). I tried to login to my Gmail (which I very rarely use) and that password had also been changed. After a few hours, I randomly decided to check my Twitter and realized my password no longer worked. When I woke up, I still did not have connectivity, but it was not obvious that something was awry as many normal emails had come through the night. I assumed it was just a roaming issue, put my phone on airplane mode (as I do every night) and went to sleep. I noticed my cell phone lost connectivity, though it still worked through Wifi. As (bad) luck would have it, I was traveling in Europe at the time. They said I had lost my cell phone and asked T-Mobile to activate another SIM with the same number.

The hackers called T-Mobile pretending to be me. I assumed that by using very complex passwords, or a password manager like Dashlane, and requiring two-factor authentication with text messages sent to my cell phone, I would be safe.īoy was I wrong! I did not realize I had a (very) weak link in my security: my cell phone provider. Because I started playing with cryptocurrencies as a hobby years ago, and for a long time they were not worth much of anything (read Some thoughts on cryptocurrencies), it did not occur to me to treat my crypto holdings more securely than other assets I owned.

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