The Martian author says Comcast let hacker take over his e-mail

Andy Weir is the creator of Mark Watney, a fictional astronaut who can solve any problem the harsh environment of Mars throws his way.

But Weir, author of The Martian, ran into a tricky problem on Earth this week when his e-mail and Twitter accounts were hacked. The culprit, he says, was a hacker who reset the password for his Comcast.net e-mail account by calling Comcast and pretending to be him. Comcast let the hacker take control of his e-mail account after asking “security questions” for which the answers were easy to find, according to Weir.

“Well I got hacked,” Weir wrote on Facebook last night. “Someone compromised my e-mail account and twitter account. I don’t know how they got the password. My guess is they socially engineered a password reset on my e-mail account, and the [sic] used that to do a password reset on Twitter. They also set up an e-mail forward to an account they control, so even after I changed my e-mail password they were still getting my e-mails until I found that. Whee.”