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It was a secure account as far as the password goes, no 2FA. Like I said it was a bit of a throwaway account. Password 15 chars long, random chars. No phishing

It was a secure account as far as the password goes, no 2FA. Like I said it was a bit of a throwaway account. Password 15 chars long, random chars. No phishing. I concluded that there's perhaps a cross-origin issue on Facebook's side that allowed cookie hijacking. The clickbaity link was almost tailor made for our group "[something ominous happened] in [your part of town]". Looks like it was auto-shared by someone whose account had been compromised as they were local. Reasonably confident it was a session hijack, my password remained the same while account locked. The only other plausible thing wrt my account's case was that it was almost empty (i.e. no photo, no friends, not much to go by) and was somehow flagged but was given a misleading reason why it was.

Thorrez 5y ago
>The only other plausible thing wrt my account's case was that it was almost empty (i.e. no photo, no friends, not much to go by) and was somehow flagged but was given a misleading reason why it was. That sounds much more likely to me. When facebook has a website vulnerability that is exploited, they log everyone out, post a blog post, and makes big news: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-hack-beach-single-sign-on-social-login https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-hack-beach-single-s... https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/09/facebook-security-bug-affects-90m-users/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/09/facebook-security-bug-af... https://about.fb.com/news/2018/09/security-update/ https://about.fb.com/news/2018/09/security-update/ >"[something ominous happened] in [your part of town]" Those ads are all over. They determine [your part of town] through geoip or FB tells the advertiser your city. It's like the "singles in [your city]" ads.
- ricardo81 5y ago
  The thing is it wasn't an ad, it was a post a regular user posted into a group. And that being the plausible answer doens't explain why me as a Northern European post-ban-resurrection ended up getting all my friends suggestions from Africans. It was never the case before that and all my activity simply involved campaigning against losing a local park and looking at local news.
  - Thorrez 5y ago
    Was the user a spam bot? Maybe the bot saw a city mentioned in the group and generated a spam comment using that city. It's possible some people (or bots) from Africa viewed your page and no one else did in the recent past, and thus Facebook thought there was some connection between you and Africa.

Thorrez 5y ago

>The only other plausible thing wrt my account's case was that it was almost empty (i.e. no photo, no friends, not much to go by) and was somehow flagged but was given a misleading reason why it was. That sounds much more likely to me. When facebook has a website vulnerability that is exploited, they log everyone out, post a blog post, and makes big news: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-hack-beach-single-sign-on-social-login https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-hack-beach-single-s... https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/09/facebook-security-bug-affects-90m-users/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/09/facebook-security-bug-af... https://about.fb.com/news/2018/09/security-update/ https://about.fb.com/news/2018/09/security-update/ >"[something ominous happened] in [your part of town]" Those ads are all over. They determine [your part of town] through geoip or FB tells the advertiser your city. It's like the "singles in [your city]" ads.

ricardo81 5y ago
The thing is it wasn't an ad, it was a post a regular user posted into a group. And that being the plausible answer doens't explain why me as a Northern European post-ban-resurrection ended up getting all my friends suggestions from Africans. It was never the case before that and all my activity simply involved campaigning against losing a local park and looking at local news.
- Thorrez 5y ago
  Was the user a spam bot? Maybe the bot saw a city mentioned in the group and generated a spam comment using that city. It's possible some people (or bots) from Africa viewed your page and no one else did in the recent past, and thus Facebook thought there was some connection between you and Africa.