Account hacked and destroyed (all refs deleted) - need help restoring it

Hello,

I really, really hope that someone at Zotero can help me with this.

My account was just hacked and destroyed. I logged in today to find everything on my account, all the references, deleted. I immediately changed my password, of course. However, I was depending on the online synching when I used my account, so I don't have any offline backups. I've definitely learned a painful lesson here, but I would be immensely grateful if anyone can restore my account to its online state just before this destruction happened.

Thank you.
  • OK, first, your account almost certainly wasn't hacked.

    Assuming you're talking about the account you're posting from, you still have 170 top-level items in your library, but most of them are in the trash. You can undelete them from the trash. All your collections seem to be intact.

    Usually when this happens it's just from leaving the account logged in on a shared computer and someone else deleting items to clean out the library without realizing that it's linked to someone else's account.
  • I just found out that a certain password I used for multiple sites, including Zotero, was hacked or guessed on some website (not Zotero, though, because it seems that this was hacked/guessed quite some time ago), then it was leaked on the web somewhere where these kinds of cyber-criminals share people's passwords and have parties of cyber-crime or whatever. Google sent me a notification about this and showed me a list of the websites for which that password was leaked. So, yes, the Zotero account itself probably wasn't hacked but someone else definitely logged into my account from somewhere other than my usual country (someone can probably find their IP, which will be from a different country most probably), and they thought it would be fun to delete all my references. I'm just grateful that they, like me, didn't know that the deleted stuff gets moved into a trash bin first. I've never used Zotero on a shared PC, so far, and I certainly hope I never have to.

    Thank you very much for telling me about the trash! Yes, I just restored everything from there now, including stuff that I know I deleted, but I don't care; I'm happy to delete what needs to be deleted again and much, much happier to have my references back. I can't count the number of hours it took me to put together this collection, however humble it may be compared to lucrative researchers.
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