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Hacked again, Lesson learned and funds are safu

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@belemo
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Have you ever had one of those days that just feels like the universe is after you? Yesterday, I just wanted to perform a very simple task and this somehow snowballed into my laptop being formatted.

Yesterday, while trying to test how to convert HBD into pHBD, I noticed that my metamask had a glitch. I talked about it in the Leofinance discord and it turned out there was a keylogger/virus in my system.

Due to the virus, my metamask was compromised but my assets were still safu because I use a ledger wallet. The virus basically affected the periphery of my metamask by converting my wallet address I copy from the extension into this one in the bracket[0xDB3D1b0813316f87ca311FFA9eD9aBE089572E6c]..

Due to this oversight, I converted 20 HBD but of course, I didn't receive it in the right wallet. I originally didn't notice the issue.

Since it is a virus, I ran a scan using Malwarebytes antivirus that was recommended for me after the first time I got hacked. I was told that this is a hardcore antivirus that doesn't take prisoners.

So, I ran the scan and just as expected, there were 9 trojans doing nasty shit on my computer. This time, I know exactly where the trojans came from and I believe it is also the source of the hack that I experienced in the past.

The story starts when I wanted to find a backdoor route to activate Microsoft office for the computers at home. For what it is worth, I was only considering this route because Microsoft was rejecting our attempt to pay with our debit card.

Anyway, I visited one KMSAuto Net site where I usually download a tool that I use to hack windows and office packages. It is a tool that I've used many times in the past.

The problem is that this time, the application didn't work but it was installed. Fast forward to a couple of days later and I noticed that weirdness happening to my metamask.

The scan

So yesterday, I ran the virus scan, immediately after publishing my post in the morning. I found 9 trojans and stuff in my system.

Malwarebytes turned out to be a little bit too brutal for my computer because while killing the viruses, it also killed something in my windows that prevented it from loading completely.

To be specific, the taskbar refused to load and I also couldn't perform some simple windows features like deleting, uninstalling a file and stuff like that.

I initially thought it was because of the antivirus, so I booted in safe mode and uninstalled the antivirus but that didn't fix the problem.

I expended my limited computer knowledge, tweaking settings in the boot logger and whatnot but all that failed me. I decided I was going to wipe the computer clean by restoring factory settings, after backing up my files.

While going back to factory settings, I then experienced one last glitch that I couldn't overcome, which was something about a loandepot email that I obviously don't have because it is for Americans.

So I took my laptop to a computer shop, I then opened it, removed the hard disk and formatted it with a different laptop. It was one of the most stressful 5-6 hours I've experienced this year.

I fought really hard to ensure I won't have to format the system because when it comes to my devices, I really hate change. I only ever change whenever I absolutely have to, and that's exclusively for when I'm upgrading.

Flashback

When I noticed the virus in my system, I flashed back to how I felt when I lost all those funds. I panicked inwardly but believed that my hardware wallet kept me safu.

In any case, I was still really concerned that I might be at risk. I feared the worst but I survived, and now I can tell the story.

I had backups that weren't on y system and also had my seed phrase for all my metamask accounts. It was a little bit of a hassle setting it all back but I achieved it in the end.

At the end of the day, I learned where or how my previous wallet might have been compromised from. Needless to say that I'm never going to download any hacked application or visit any sketchy website.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta