Victim of Twitter username hijacking gets a handle on @N once again

The high-profile theft of a single-letter Twitter username has a happy ending — at least for now. Naoki Hiroshima, who managed to score @N, though had it hijacked as part of an eye-opening social engineering scheme last month, is now once again in control of it. Hiroshima tweeted “Order has been restored” from the account today:

Details of how the account was returned to Hiroshima’s possession are currently unclear, but the tale of how it was lost in the first place was well documented. In a post on blogging service Medium last month, Hiroshima recounted a harrowing experience of having both his PayPal and GoDaddy accounts compromised through social engineering techniques, something that gave the attacker enough leverage to push for the Twitter login credentials.

The debacle ultimately became a cautionary tale in the importance of personal security, and how online companies verify sensitive account information and deal with threats to user accounts. In GoDaddy’s case, it also resulted in policy change that requires users to provide extra information about their credit cards in order to verify account credentials.