Twitter returns a $50,000 username to its original owner

In January, Naoki Hiroshima lost his Twitter handle, @N, to the hands of a hacker who used social engineering and extortion to wrest the username from Hiroshima’s hands. But today Twitter restored it to him after more than a month of the username being suspended. After @N was stolen, Hiroshima wrote a post explaining how the theft happened. Ars published the story (which originally appeared on Medium), as well as an account of a man whose more valuable @jb handle was almost hijacked using the same methods. In Hiroshima’s case, a hacker was able to obtain some credit card information from his PayPal account and used that to reset the login credentials on his GoDaddy account. Then, the thief modified several details pertaining to Hiroshima’s domain so that he was unable to access his own site’s information. When the thief couldn’t reset the password for @N, he turned to extortion, contacting Hiroshima and demanding he reset the password to his Twitter account or suffer the destruction of his website’s domains.