From hacked to restored: Our Facebook story and what we learnt from it
It was a morning like any other when the team was up and about, getting things done. All of a sudden, the ping of a notification on each team member’s phones got them to stop everything they were doing.
It was a mail saying they had lost admin access to the Blogchatter Facebook page!
Minutes later another mail said the page name had been changed.
We were hacked
We began to receive calls and messages from our fellow community members, wondering why Blogchatter had changed the page name.
In a blur of a few moments things had begun to spiral downwards. The hacker had started posting random posts on the page and also started running a scam ad which meant a lot was at stake. Random people online were at risk of getting scammed.
We and many from the community joined hands to report the ad and get our page back.
Steps we took
The best we could think of at that time was to:
- Contact Meta support with id proofs and other details
- Get 2 Factor Authentication activated across all channels if it wasn’t, and across team’s channels too.
- Get as many people as possible to report the page.
- Comment on the random posts the hacker had begun to post saying the page was hacked and demanding they restore it to the rightful owners.
- Tag Mumbai Cyber Police on those posts.
- Continue tweeting and RTing to get more visibility on our complaint.
- In general keep a constant lookout for any more suspicious activity on the page.
- We also got in touch with someone from Meta India, who guided us through the entire process.
Incredible support from the community
We knew such things would take time and we were not really sure when we would get the page restored, or even if we would. What really shook all of us was the years, and years of content on our page and the fear that it would get deleted now.
We kept doing what we were doing to get heard and on a random day the page just disappeared. We didn’t know if the hacker had deleted it or it was Meta India looking into the issue. Either way we had to wait.
Our community was the biggest support through it all. They’ve seen the effort we have put into Blogchatter over 7 years and as like minded creators, they knew it wasn’t easy. We had messages, calls from them, offering comfort, asking if we heard anything and we truly valued all these words of encouragement.
One fine day…
The next few days were tedious and the radio silence was so loud. We had almost lost hope when one fine day, Blogchatter’s Facebook Page was restored. It took a while to become fully functional, but wow, were we thrilled!
A lesson in security and owning your platform
Making sure our passwords are strong and we have 2FA enabled was of course a huge lesson we gathered through this and another was of something we cannot stress enough on: having our own platform…a blog we can call our own.
Social media platforms are volatile and constantly changing.
A blog is a space we own and have autonomy over, which is so important as a creator, don’t you think so?
