The Meme Repository | TMR

Hello all! I hope you're ready for this... I promised you a big mega post about what happened. Before we get started. TL;DR: I was suspended on Facebook without warning and was a victim of a major security incident with @facebook's API (Incident still pending with legal authorities). This all happened back on the 23rd of February at around 12pm I would say? My best friend messaged me on WhatsApp to ask what happened to my Facebook? Me being me, I didn't really think much of it, but instantly when I went on my profile I noticed I was logged out of my account on all devices, my PC, my Phone etc. I had thought geez, they finally suspended me for some stupid post that got flagged up on their automated system. However I was a bit suspicious as recently over the past few years, my posts have improved and I've been focused more on not only funny content but posting my live streaming stuff as I've been popping off and doing okay at it. I noticed when I logged back into my account, I receive a message: "We've suspended your account" "Your account was suspended because your linked @meta account doesn't follow our rules". "Log in to your linked auth.oculus.com account to appeal our decision." Two buttons: Go to auth.oculus.com or Download Your Information. Alarm bells started ringing. I instantly downloaded my data; not only that, I do not at this point have a Meta account as I don't own any Oculus products. While downloading my data, I googled everything you could think of until I came across a meta forum post with someone in Australia discussing something similar to my issue. At this time I believe there was only a handful of people mentioning a suspension. But with how many user's use this platform, I thought no way was this related to my issue as I would see loads of people respond. I went back to doing what I was doing and thought I would try and appeal later in the day. I returned to the forum post after posting earlier and noticed that what was 2 or 3 pages of comments slowly creep up to just under 100... within 24 hours this forum thread reached up to the 100 mark and roughly there were at least 1K people on the forums online viewing this thread. My hear sank, I instantly knew I was a victim of a cyber attack on my profile. We quickly formed an email group to discuss things on email with others effected. We were posting findings on the forum thread; we were panicking. User's losing photos of family members from 10 years ago, content creators and businesses effected and losing out on sales and views for their channels; this was a massive breach of security for Facebook/Meta. We all piled onto Meta to get assistance from employees through LinkedIn, trying to find a live chat system or a way to log a ticket. We were in the dark. We suggested let's make a discord group to live chat with each other and try and resolve this as a community. I had even found a Meta Quest discord that was the official Meta discord to try and post in there. I had saw there was the odd member from Meta as an admin. As you could imagine that went dry and nowhere either. While scanning our data we noticed that everyone in our discord who was effected had a few things in common. We all had a Facebook Ad Manager as we have all ran advertisements. As you know I do the odd charity event and post my Halo community Spartan War Games as I want to attract new members. Not only that, I have used Facebook Marketplace too. We also noticed all of the IP addresses that had accessed our account were based in Vietnam or Thailand. Some were dotted around the US so we knew that these people were either across the other side of the world or using a VPN to ghost their locations. They had removed our email addresses, phone numbers, ID; anything that would stop us from being able to log a ticket and recover our data so when we tried to recover, Meta and Facebook would instantly decline as none of our data existed on their side. See the main issue here is since they linked a meta account that got banned from being under the age of 13 which is against ToS for Meta. When we went to the link on the suspension message, it told us to go to Meta. We went to Meta but they said go to Facebook as they have a team that could help. That's when we realised this is a bigger issue. There is physically no way to get our accounts back at this point through normal means. We made a website so we could share all findings, details and make something official. I mentioned in the group I have a verified Twitter/X account I could use to post a mega thread on there and get everyone to interact with this. Little did I know this was one of the best things we could've done. I spent a total of £30 to advertise the post using Twitter/X advertising. We were slowly getting user's outside of our main group come to us and join the fight and share their experiences. We tried to get in contact with tech content creators and news agents to try and make awareness of the situation. We managed to only get two creators... Both had at least 50k to 150k followers. The best part about this? They also were BOTH affected by this, meaning they couldn't make any more money via Facebook for content. This was good. I then used this opportunity to contact Facebook and Meta directly on DM but they hadn't posted anything on Twitter/X for over 3 months at this point so it was a wasted effort. The Twitter/X thread grew. More people joining and suddenly as my Thread got to over 8K views from different accounts. This was the same time the forum post on Meta's own forum became the most viewed and commented thread of all time on their site. We gained over 3k replies and were at page 150 at this point. I was on a train home from being out working on another site. I had happened to go on our discord with the shitty WiFi and noticed someone saying "Is anyone else noticing some comments are gone?" We all jumped on and I shit you not, moderators of the website were actively deleting comment after comment. We recorded this and have realtime proof that pages were being deleted. Soon after the forum post was gone. My heart sank; our first real way of bringing this to attention was gone. We were silenced... Quickly we all jumped on a discord call. At this point our discord was around 250 user's strong. We all jumped on, muted our mic and took it in turns to discuss what had happened. We all suggested that it was time to try not only a social media presence, but a legal one. Facebook and Meta still refusing to comment to speak to us. We all scrambled onto our machines to log tickets with government bodies, some with no luck as they did not deal with social media hacking queries. At this point, we managed to find out that Meta Pro/Verified has a chat function that enables you to discuss with an employee, so we tried this avenue getting a few user's on it to raise awareness. We had the usual NPC responses. At this time, I had recently discovered Action Fraud who specialised in reporting awareness of crimes committed online and worked with the Met Police over this. I thought perfect. I rang up one day but had rang them half hour before they closed so I wasn't able to get through. I tagged everyone on our discord to say jump into a voice chat now, I will record not only the call, but put on loud speaker for all to hear. Sure enough, I rang up and about 27 minutes into the queue, I got through to a lady called Grace. We were on the phone for an hour discussing everything that happened. I said at the start, not only am I recording this call, I am also in a voice chat with 20+ people who had the time to join listening in as we're effect. All walks of life from people abroad, different types etc. The lady was so understanding and lovely that she took my enquiry and logged an official ticket. Great we had some government awareness of the situation now. We asked everyone to report this and was able to get a few of the UK members of the group to also make a report to Action Fraud UK. At this point we had two Meta Employee's ring one of US contact's and were in chat's about what had happened. They mentioned that they could only refer and had no powers to do anything about this as they still couldn't confirm who we were. Great another dud lead. It's the first of March, it's midnight and I received a message from a random user who said they got their account back and provided their details. There situation seemed different to ours so I didn't credit it. I thought let me try and log in again and what would you know. My account was back! I was shocked, I immediately followed the on screen instructions as if it was creating a new user in terms of privacy, cookie storing, 2FA, new passwords etc; baring in mind, I had 2FA enabled already and at no point were there any prompts to say no to people trying to get in. I was back... I had tons of notifications I had missed and a lot of them being someone is trying to get into your account type thing. I went on discord to announce this, within seconds people joined the voice chat and were shocked as I were. We managed to get loads of people logged back in! This was great for everyone as it seemed like we were finally heard. We checked our Ad Manager account and noticed that we had a fuck ton of Vietnamese sounding names as admins in our account. this was bad as most of use had securely stored our card information online. It was a good job I cancelled my card and got a new one when this all started. I had asked my bank to block any payments from Facebook going forward until I say so. We removed all of these accounts and were back to normal... What have I learned from all of this? • Facebook was hit in October of 2023 with an API attack on the Ad Manager and Marketplace that put over 200,000 people in risk of losing their account and details being stolen. • I have also learned that Facebook and Meta as a company do not have customer service skills or a facility at large to deal with the immense pressure over the past week of 1000's of user's desperately trying to get their accounts back. • Social media and Legal pressure had worked. • I made a fuck ton of new online friends over discord; in which some I found out loved Halo so I invited them into our group! We are now planning to do a once a year Facebook Trauma movie night on the anniversary March 1st. • There are some user's reporting they can't still log into their Instagram accounts, but they're slowly reappearing back. • At no point did Facebook or Meta address the issue by and large. • The attack was cookie theft as a weakness was found on their site. Currently while I'm happy that loads of these people I did managed to meet got their accounts back, I'm still unsure if I want to use Facebook as a product anymore if the security of this site is constantly being attacked. You just need to go on google to find out what happens all the time with Facebook and how behind they are on with their own security. I am asking if you've gotten this far, if you would still like to contact me on other platforms in the event I suddenly remove myself off Facebook. Please DM on Facebook. I will provide you the best ways to reach me and keep in touch. Here are all the links you need for proof of what had happened: Original Meta Post (Access Denied now): communityforums.atmeta.com/t… The website we created to document things initially: bookingexploits.com/ Twitter Thread by MemeRepos that explains what happened: xitter.cf/MemeRepos/status… My Twitter post for a call to action that blew up and gained the attraction it needed: xitter.cf/SpartanWarGames/… Our Discord to live chat with other affected people: discord.gg/W9FfQGKD4k YouTube video's: youtube.com/watch?v=KJI7xqoh… / youtube.com/watch?v=P22wUO2p… / youtube.com/watch?v=HPnKBtng… / youtube.com/watch?v=XdJ5cUBs… (There were a few others but not well presented ones) Petition to call Facebook up to change it's security: change.org/p/demand-that-fac… TikTok video: vm.tiktok.com/ZMMR3QEhx/ Another Meta thread that got wiped: communityforums.atmeta.com/t… My phone call to Action Fraud UK: drive.google.com/file/d/1RmD… Tech News: cybernews.com/news/oculus-me… / hackread.com/linked-oculus-a… / bleepingcomputer.com/news/se… / bnnbreaking.com/world/vietna… My Action Fraud UK References from me and other UK users: NFRC240206492613 NFRC240206500872 NFRC240206501049 NFRC240206495130 NFRC240206499699 If there are any other links or videos/screenshots you wish to ask for, please DM me, I will see what I can do. If you've gotten this far, I hope this build's a better picture on why I was away for an entire week and I appreciate all the memes that people have sent me about me being an idiot online again as well as family and friends being worried I had done something. You all kept me sane while I was dealing with this and I'm sorry for those who didn't know because I was so focused on sorting this out, I didn't reach out to anyone I knew IRL as I was with my online family during this. I am back for now, but if I do go. Please know this is because I have little faith in Facebook as a product now. I am still seeking legal advice on if my details were stolen and sold. So I will provide information as and when I get it. Thank you and have a great weekend :)

MASSIVE UPDATE: Our accounts are back! Go to Facebook.com on a desktop or laptop. Log in; if you get an error on screen use the top right corner to log in. Fill out and follow on screen instructions to secure your account. And you're back! Make sure to check your ads manager to remove any admins from your profile you don't recognise. More importantly, change your passwords and check your activity log for any logins and remove the ones you don't recognise. Set up 2FA if you haven't already. While this is great news. We are still silent on any public apology or reassurances that our data hasn't been breached. I will still enquire about this. SHARE SHARE SHARE!!!!

We're covering it also xitter.cf/SpartanWarGames/status…

@facebook & @meta are you going to issue not only a public apology but an update on the 1000's of accounts that were victim to the Oculus exploit to suspend accounts? 1000s are without Facebook accounts and have lost businesses while non of us can appeal as the accounts are now unlinked and send us in a spiral/loop. No official word on this. Forum: communityforums.atmeta.com/t… YouTube: youtu.be/KJI7xqohmwk?si=hgJa… Reddit: reddit.com/r/facebook/s/teXY… 1) When are we going to have the false suspension uplift 2) What assurances do we have that credit card information or personal data has been exposed during this attack as I was not prompted for 2FA nor do I own a Meta/Oculus account @Oculus_Dev @danastingregory @bbc @cnn @gbnews @elonmusk for awareness if you could maybe give the Zuck a nudge his platform has been exposed...