Twitter returns the @N account to its original owner.

Many of you remember the story of Naoki Hiroshima (Naoki Hiroshima) about how he was extorted from his short @N account. Hacker used social engineering techniques in order to gain control of the account.

The attacker was able to obtain some Hiroshima credit card information from a PayPal account and used it to reset GoDaddy account information. Then the thief changed several details related to the Hiroshima domains so that the owner could not access the information of his own site. When the hacker was unable to reset the password from the account, he began to extort, contacting Hiroshima and demanding to reset the password in his Twitter account.

In the end, Hiroshima gave the account to the attacker, and also notified Twitter, but the latter refused to immediately return access, citing an investigation. Later the ill-fated account was made private and closed, but access was never restored.

The good news is that yesterday, Twitter regained control of the account to its rightful owner, after almost a month.
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It remains to be seen why the decision to return the account to the original owner took so much time. Twitter representatives declined to comment, citing the privacy and security policies of private accounts. Be that as it may, this is a really nice ending to the story.