Help! My Account Has Been Hacked!

Many too many have stood where you stand.

Too many more will stand here too.

I hear your account's been hacked,

you've had to change your name

Build your contact lists again. (with apologies to Genesis - Many Too Many, 1978)

This hasn't happened to me --- yet. But I've been doing something I thought everyone knew about and I think it's helped prevent it. And yet, when my wife mentioned the lengths a friend of hers had to go to, in order to move heaven and earth to convince some social media site that, yes, yes! I really am that person! someone stole my account and I want it back! I turned to her and said, "Did she have MFA?"

She said, "I don't think so. How do I do that, anyway?" And I realized that I'd probably let her down on this one.

"Wait a sec," I said, "You have MFA don't you?" I'm geeky enough, we've been together long enough that she knows what MFA is, but she hadn't figured out how to do it for herself. Other things got in the way before now, but today, those were put aside for about 30 minutes and I made sure she had MFA on all her accounts and understood how to use it.

It's not hard and all of you, my neighbours, deserve to have the same protection for yourselves (and it's REALLY not that hard to do).

There's a community I'm a part of, attached to a weekly youtube rant with graphics, song parodies, guests, open source intelligence deep dives (you know who you are) -- you can't "just believe" everything they say (there are a couple of points on which I disagree with them or at least have my strong doubts) but they're a tribe I don't mind hanging with (@the_five8) though I'm pretty stodgy in a bunch of ways compared to them. Recently, several of them have changed their names several times, so it's made me wonder if either:

1. this MFA thing isn't as effective as I thought (and I've been lucky) OR
2. this MFA thing isn't as widespread as I thought

Adding MFA to ALL your account is, like, so 90s or 00s, you know? Oh. You don't? Oh yeah. I'm a geek, a nerd. Worn with pride but sometimes I miss the implications.

Some of the OSInt people on the Five 8 have really angered a few people. One of them (not one of the hacking victims) has had to leave home, never to return until the local powers that be are no longer mobsters who'll cause injury or death if a return is ever attempted. No. I'm not joking. The situation's broad strokes are a matter of public record in credible press reports and other places.

Anyways... another one said, when I poked at the MFA subject, that they had no younger relatives to appeal to for help setting up MFA, so I decided to write this -- a blog thread, if you will. Oh Arthur, that is just so 90s.... and you do threads on twitter! not on a blog... (I don't care. I'll do it this way anyway).

So, what is MFA? click newer to find out. 🧵1/4