The Seneca Blog Hacked

Now, fortunately, restored

You may have noticed how the Seneca blog was unavailable from Tuesday and was restored only this morning. Someone stole my passwords and used them to do all sorts of bad things to several of my accounts. As a consequence, Substack blocked all my blogs.

It took me days of work to recover my accounts, and I am not finished yet. Fortunately, I can tell you that my main blogs, the “Seneca Effect” and “Living Earth” suffered no permanent damage. You may still see the name of the hacker, “Swyftx” as the post author, but that should return to normal soon. All posts are still there, and the subscriber list is intact. We’ll keep going.

But let me tell you that the vulnerability of our work is impressive when it is uploaded to the cloud. I have to say that I was somewhat careless with my passwords — I knew that some of them were at risk, and I was slowly changing them to new ones, but I was too slow and sometimes careless.

So, be very careful: years of work may be lost in an instant. But, in this case, I was smart enough that I had recent backups, and even in the worst case, I would have lost only a few recent posts. Having this certainty was a big psychological support in a difficult moment. If it never happened to you, you can’t imagine how much work it takes to bring things back to normal! So, I can hardly imagine how I would have felt during these days if I had been afraid that I could have lost all my work of recent years. Seneca’s stoicism and his De Consolatione ad Helviam would have been of little comfort.

Two other (minor) blogs of mine, “Reptilian Starfleet” and “Chimeras,” suffered some irreparable damage: the whole subscriber list was lost. I am asking Substack to recover the list, but I am afraid that it is lost forever. So, if you subscribed to one of those blogs, please re-subscribe to get email notifications.

And we keep going! Thanks to all of you for your support!