Preview ep28, and wtf happened!?

First of all, thank you all for your support and actions during the last week. It's been quite hectic, but it is starting to look like both myself and my channel made it through with relatively minor damage. The scammers seemed purely focussed on doing the minimal possible to get as much scammy-crypto-streaming-time in as they could, destroying whatever was in their way for their cause, but not going out of their way to cause me unneccesary personal harm. No files were deleted, no money was stolen, neither from patreon nor from me directly (I do have 2FA on everything important, but that included my Google/Youtube account, and I still don't know exactly how the scam worked in bypassing all that). In some weird way, I feel genuinly thankful for the attack being "purely (criminal) business, not personal". The only thing which seems lost forever, is all the comments on every single video. That's sad, but still, I think we are very near to the best possible outcome that could have occured.

Story time

The moment the scam happened, I was abroad, about 2 hours from home. I had driven my wife to the airport the evening before in our campervan, and I spent a bad, noisy night, directly next to the highway on a highway parking near the airport (it was a night flight, and I thought it better to drive fresh the next day). Anyway, the next morning I decided to stay a bit and work from the van for most of the day. I did my translations, then got through a bunch of email stuff which included me running the malicious file without noticing (Alarm bells system was offline apparently, I was feeling a bit sad/slow since my wife and me would be seperate for 3 weeks). I clicked the ".pdf" (.pdf.scr), it didn't open but nothing else happened either (no teamviewer takeovers and all that stuff, no warnings, no pc lockdowns, no strange stuff happening, everything functioned normal, and at the time I didn't know a .scr could be damaging. What is a screensaver going to do anyway. It took a bit of time before I had the clearmindedness to google ".scr scam" or something similar, where I learned that a .scr is actually an executable file. That's finally moment "the quarter fell" as we say in the Netherlands, the Epiphany to which I realized I needed to take action. Since nothing had seemed to have happened yet, I wasn't too panicked, but I decided to prepare for a clean windows install just to be sure. I connected my USB hard disk and started copying my video files, editing projects, savegames, and some select .roaming folders like factorio (for the settings and all). I think I switched off wifi too at that time, but it was already too late. At some point I think I looked at my phone, and noticed I was signed out of gmail... The .scr file script had already gotten into my Google account...

When I found out, of course I started panicking, being abroad and alone in a van on a highway parking wasn't helping. I tried logging in, but of course my password was changed by then, my 2FA switched off, the recovery email changed, and eventually the phone number as well. I tried for over 2 hours I think, every time going though the same loop with minor variations, everytime coming back at "I didn't give enough information to prove the account is mine".

I then tried finding how the F to contact Google/Youtube to lock my account (similar to calling your bank to block your card if it's lost or stolen), but no such options exist. The scammers had meanwhile taken over my youtube account, and had started streaming some tesla crypto scam. They streamed for 2-3 hours I think, before my channel got blocked by all of you and other viewers reporting the scam stream and channel hijack.

The scammers seem to have known exactly which security settings to change and which new 2FA to put in place so that any of my existing 2FA on trusted devices would not be asked for during any of my login attempts, and ALSO their script evaded any security prompt, or even security notification to me. Subjectively, I hate them of course, but objectively, I'm amazed at how good the script is, truly a single-mouse-click show, after which the whole process was executed with 100% stealth, like in some Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movie.

I was panicking like a madman by now, I knew I would perhaps have better chances if my "trusted devices" were also on a "known location", and eventually I took the hard decision to give up on trying, and try to focus purely on the 2 hour drive home. I never had a more difficult drive, and I told myself over and over to stay focussed on driving, but I felt like I was almost like out of my body/mind. Fortunately my inner autopilot took over (thanks delivery van/truck driver job years!), and I managed to keep control without even speeding really. Then my brother messaged me, saying that an attempt to watch my video now stopped resulting in "this video is private" and changed to "this video is deleted" or "this channel is deleted".

Now, at the time, I still assumed they'd hold my account for ransom or something, keeping hope to get my channel back, but at that moment, I fell down a black hole. I have to first explain, due to my wife and I being from different countries without realistically being able to apply for common residence in either, a remote, independant job is hugely important for me, as we have to move countries frequently to keep complying with all visa regulations. I always knew my webshop translation job won't last forever. Due to management, the time spent per translation has gone down and down, together with the quality of our translations. I feel we're now almost down to being on par with automatic machine translations by now, but I'll let them figure that out by themselves. So, after years of putting long periods of heart and soul into video making, slowly seeing the channel grow, then the incredible "popularity explosion" with the Ultimate Deathworld series, finally starting to believe I can perhaps make "this video producing hobby" into my real, sustainable job, was such a hope, a relief, a dream starting to come true, and POOF. Everything I had built up was gone. Just like that. With some naive judgement and a single click. I was still driving, somehow.

At this point, I felt everything was lost for good. The scammers had deleted my channel for some reason. I still didn't know how to get in contact with an actual person at google. I already was accepting the loss and thinking about the best way to rebuild. A new channel. Reupload videos. Ask for you all to spread the word and rewatch my old series. Hope the algorithm picks me up again. I even was cautiously hopeful that it would work. Then I realized I was lost, physically lost this time. It was dark, and I had taking the wrong exit on the highway, losing even more precious time. My roaming data had completely finished, but I knew the road, well, at least I thought. So I had to stop next to the road and figure out the way like in the olden days. Man. Now, before, my furthest drive I ever did, was from the Netherlands to Novosibirsk, a 6000 km journey for an adventure in the Altai mountains. I'm still debating over which drive took longer.

I got home eventually, and by that time the scam stream had ended, my account was inaccessible, "account terminated" as the terminology goes. That sounds awfully definitive. Being at home, in a "google trusted location", didn't help to recover my account, but I could still log in to patreon, and by that time, among other creator patreons who had started contacting google on my behalf, also 3 of you happened to work at google, saying they could try to help to "escalate" things, altough not working in the accounts department, each of them wrote individually with ALMOST EXACTLY the same wording........ Now being extremely paranoid (a feeling which will still remain for a while, I assume), I started a group email without asking (sorry, not the right thing to do privacy wise), but after that I was reassured. From there on, and with their help, recovery was incredibly swift, with very professional support finally from A Real Google Person (who DID work in accounts ;) )

Sure, all-in-all by the time of writing this post, I now spent like 4 18-hour days back to back crunched behind my laptop to get through the whole recovery process (and afterwards getting my laptops back in working shape) as quickly, comprehensively and accurately as was possible, but if you take an outside view, account recovery was remarkably quick. I got hacked tuesday afternoon, got my gmail account back before I even went to sleep (around 6AM the next night), and my youtube account was recoverd and given back under my control on thursday afternoon. Only 2 days. 48 hours. I bet a significant share of the regular viewers didn't even notice a thing, with any luck. Man. Incredible. So, thanks everyone for all the things you did to try and aid in recovering my channel, and special thanks to the "internal forces" at google!

(End of story time!)

Also, it is very heartwarming to see so many of you have chosen to start supporting me on patreon after the hack, even though at that moment there were no "benefits" for you (like any early access videos). And since my regular schedule has been thrown overboard, let me quickly re-explain how I normally do things:

I publish on YouTube every friday morning 09:00 CET. I try my very best to stay a full week ahead of YouTube episode X release day, so that I can publish episode X+1 on patreon the exact same moment that Episode X gets publicly released on youtube. That means, normally an episode is in early access for a full week. Except... 12-24 hours BEFORE the moment of youtube release, I need to schedule said video for that release, and scheduling a video changes it's visibility from "Hidden" (playable only if you have the link) to "Private". That means, early access ends 12-24 hours before the moment of publishing (Fridays 09:00 CET)

Video planning:

Because of the swift recovery, and my personal one-week-ahead policy, I was able to youtube-publish an episode this friday without missing a beat (dec-09), and I will publish the 2nd episode of the side project (which was supposed to become an extra, but oh well), next week instead (dec-16). I'll work extra hard this week to get a full new episode (the completion of our green green base) in patreon early access by this friday (dec-16) too (which will be youtube-published by dec-23, and by that point I should be back to my one-week-ahead schedule). The video attached to this post is the first minutes of that video. I normally don't post incomplete work (to which I might change things later, not all parts in this video came out so good like I had it in my head lol robotic voice), but for this time I'll make an exception, for those who are dying to watch something new (This video will be reuploaded as part of the full episode however). For the continuation of the side-project after ep2, I don't know yet, I kind of want to stream the whole thing (at least until the rocket launch, if we get there somehow).

Anyway, this is my longest patreon post ever, but I feel you deserve to know the whole story, for those who want to read it. Now hopefully Patreon will let me copy/paste it from notepad without crossing some charcater limit lol...

Enjoy!

Michael