The Worst Morning of My Developer Life — A Patient Hacker, a Fake AI Tool, and 150 Deleted Repos — My Story

I Woke Up to 150+ Deleted GitHub Repos and a Ransom Note — This Is What Happened A real developer. A real attack. A real recovery. I almost didn't write this. Partly because it's embarrassing. Partly because I'm still angry about it. But mostly because I know there are developers out there running the exact same tools I was running, making the exact same mistakes I was making — and I don't want them to wake up to what I woke up to on the morning of March 24, 2026. So here it is. The full story. No sugar coating. The Morning Everything Was Gone I opened my laptop like any other morning. Grabbed my coffee, opened GitHub, and just… froze. My repositories were gone. Not some of them. Not a few. Over 150 repositories across multiple organizations — personal projects, client work, production backends — all gone. Replaced by repositories with random UUID names, each containing a single file with this message: All production database backups have been deleted from your systems and securely sto