Account Takeover Recovery for Melbourne Individuals: Get Your Hijacked Email, Social, or Banking Account Back — Properly

You clicked a link in what looked like a parcel-delivery SMS, entered your details on a page that looked exactly like the real one, and now you cannot log in to your email. Or your Instagram is posting crypto ads to your followers. Or your bank has called to ask about a transaction you didn’t make. The attacker is already moving — resetting passwords on your downstream accounts, reading your inbox, checking which retailers have your card stored. Account Takeover Recovery from Cyber by Exegesis is the engagement that walks a Melbourne individual through the recovery sequence in the right order, so the attacker loses access and stays out.

The problem

Phishing and scams are the top-reported scam category at ACCC Scamwatch, and once a credential is captured, the attacker’s playbook is fast and well-rehearsed. They change your recovery email and phone number, enable forwarding rules so they keep reading your mail even after you reset the password, pivot to any account that uses that email for password resets, and try card details against retailers with saved payment methods.

Most people, understandably, panic-reset the password on the obvious account and assume the problem is solved. It isn’t. The ACSC guidance for individuals and families is clear that account recovery needs to cover the compromised account, the devices that touched it, and every downstream account that trusts it for password reset. Doing this in the wrong order — for instance, resetting your email password while the attacker’s session is still active and forwarding rules are still in place — gives the attacker time to lock you back out.

What Account Takeover Recovery does

Cyber by Exegesis runs a fixed-scope recovery engagement for individuals:

• A triage call to identify which account was compromised, which other accounts share that email or password, and what the attacker has likely already accessed.
• A coordinated reset across the affected provider — password, sign-out of all sessions, removal of attacker-added recovery methods, audit of mailbox forwarding and filter rules, audit of connected apps and OAuth grants.
• Downstream account recovery — for every service that uses the compromised email for password reset, we work through the queue in priority order (banking and payments first, then identity documents, then social and retail).
• A device check on the phone or laptop you used when the credential was captured, including a review of installed browser extensions and any apps granted account access.
• A short written summary of what was changed, what to watch for over the next 30 days (statement reviews, unexpected mail, new-device sign-in alerts), and how to report to Scamwatch and — where relevant — your bank and the eSafety Commissioner.

Cyber by Exegesis is the cyber consultancy line of Exegesis, the same company behind DRMO. Account Takeover Recovery is a recovery engagement, not legal or financial advice; where the incident crosses into fraud or image-based abuse, we point you to the right regulator and help you prepare the report.

How it works

1. You book a triage slot through the waitlist. We start with a 20-minute call to map the compromised account, the devices involved, and the downstream accounts that share the same email or password.
2. We walk you through the primary-account recovery on a screen-share, in the right order: regain access, sign out all sessions, remove attacker recovery methods, audit forwarding and filter rules, audit connected apps.
3. We work through the downstream queue with you — banking and payment accounts first, then anything tied to identity (myGov, ATO, driver licence apps), then social and retail.
4. We run the device-side check on the phone or laptop where the credential was entered, looking at browser extensions, app permissions, and any sign-in alerts that landed after the compromise.
5. We leave you with a written summary, a 30-day watch-list, and the Scamwatch and eSafety report templates pre-filled with your incident details.

Why this matters in Melbourne

Melbourne households sit on the same phishing patterns reported across Australia at ACCC Scamwatch — parcel-delivery SMS, fake myGov and ATO notices, bank-impersonation messages, marketplace buyer scams — and the city’s high concentration of professional workers means a hijacked personal email often holds work documents, tax records, and the password-reset path to a dozen other services. Recovering an account properly the first time, rather than discovering three weeks later that the attacker is still inside via a forwarding rule or an OAuth grant, is the difference between a bad afternoon and a six-month identity-restoration project.

Sources

• ACCC Scamwatch (National Anti-Scam Centre): https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/
• ACSC guidance for individuals and families: https://www.cyber.gov.au/protect-yourself
• eSafety Commissioner (for incidents involving online abuse or image-based abuse following an account takeover): https://www.esafety.gov.au/
• OAIC Notifiable Data Breaches scheme (for awareness if your data was held by an organisation that has notified you of a breach): https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/notifiable-data-breaches
• Cyber by Exegesis — Account Takeover Recovery (waitlist)

Join the waitlist

Join the waitlist — first access when Cyber by Exegesis opens Account Takeover Recovery for Melbourne individuals

We are sequencing recovery engagements by account type (email and identity first, social and retail second) and by urgency. Join the waitlist with the type of account compromised and roughly when it happened — we will tell you when we can take your brief.