Omb, my streamyx broadband account was hacked!

[OMB=Oh my Buddha]

Yeah, it hap­pened yes­ter­day when I was try­ing to con­nect (with­out suc­cess for sev­eral hours) to the inter­net via my streamyx account. Streamyx is an inter­net broad­band ser­vice pro­vided by Telekom (one of the tel­cos) in Malaysia.

As usual, I called the ser­vice hot­line of streamyx (1300–88-9515) to report the fault. After the rou­tine of flush­ing the DNS cache, switched off and on the modem/router, unplugged and re-plugged the modem/router as per ‘instruc­tions” with the cus­tomer ser­vice con­sul­tant, the prob­lem is unre­solved. There­fore, a report was raised by the cus­tomer ser­vice and I was informed that the tech­ni­cal ser­vice per­son­nel will con­tact me and come to my office for check­ing as soon as possible.

To my sur­prise, a tech­ni­cian from Telekom called me within two hours. My pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence was that it may take up to few days for them to make first con­tact let alone solv­ing the problem.

Account “hacked” by third party

The tech­ni­cian asked why I used the account at home and at the office at the same time. I said it was not true as my streamyx account at home is dif­fer­ent account from the office with dif­fer­ent user IDs.

The tech­ni­cian said would called me back later after some check­ing. Sure enough he called back shortly inform­ing that my user ID was used by a third party in the state of Kedah which was more than 400 km from Selangor.

He said the third party has accessed my account pos­si­bly using my pass­word. Then I real­ized that recently I asked Telekom to reset the pass­word after some out­age. The pass­word was sim­ple and given by the Telekom. It was TMNet123. I for­got to change the pass­word after the reset.

How the third party know the pass­word? — Two possibilities

1. The pass­word was so sim­ple and it is very easy to guess and per­haps eas­ily hacked by a hacker.

2. The pass­word was some­how given to the third party from inside.

My two cents

There­fore it is very impor­tant to change your default pass­word given by your broad­band provider IMMEDIATELY after you have set up your broad­band con­nec­tion. Most peo­ple are plain lazy to do so or sim­ply not aware of such.

It is also advis­able to change the pass­word fre­quently to incor­po­rate let­ters, sym­bols, num­bers to have stronger encryption.

Have you changed your password?

Tags: broadband, hacked, internet, Malaysia, password, streamyx, telekom