I Got Hacked

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:05:01 +0530

I made a rookie mistake.

I built a Telegram bot that fetches top stories from Lobste.rs — ones scoring above a threshold I set. Straightforward enough. The problem was deployment.

I’m not great at setting up servers, so I turned to AI for help. I don’t usually accept AI output blindly, but this time I did, and it gave me this:

# docker-compose.yml
services:
 db:
 image: mysql:8.0
 restart: unless-stopped
 environment:
 MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: rootpassword
 MYSQL_DATABASE: ${MYSQL_DB:-lobster_bot}
 MYSQL_USER: ${MYSQL_USER:-lobster}
 MYSQL_PASSWORD: ${MYSQL_PASSWORD:-lobsterpassword}
 volumes:
 - mysql_data:/var/lib/mysql
 ports:
 - "3306:3306"

The bot ran fine for two days. Then the Telegram notifications stopped.

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I Got Hacked