A Facebook spokesperson, in an emailed statement to news.abs-cbn.com, said the company has built "numerous defenses to combat phishing and malware, including complex automated systems that work behind the scenes to detect and flag Facebook accounts that are likely to be compromised."
The same automated systems prompted Facebook "to ask a set of people to secure their accounts."
"This was due to a bug in the system and the precautionary step was not needed in this case, so we have removed the messages and the impacted people should now be able to access their accounts normally," the spokesperson said. "We apologise for any inconvenience we caused."
Over the past week, reports of Filipino Facebook users getting locked out of their accounts surfaced, alarming some that it may be the work of a secret group of hackers.
Leonard Postrado, a 29-year-old BPO content writer, said he was chatting with friends on Facebook earlier this week when he was suddenly kicked out of the social networking site.
"When I entered the password, ayaw pumasok sa account ko. I did it four times until Facebook notified me na may phishing attack sa FB ko at pinapabago ako ng password. I don't know what that means kasi di ako techie until ginoogle ko and nakalagay nga collecting data," he said.
(When I entered the password, I still couldn't get to my account. I did it four times until Facebook notified me that there was a phishing attack on my account and said I should change my password. I didn't know what that meant because I'm not techie so I googled it and found out it meant collecting data.)
A similar incident happened to 36-year-old government employee Kim Quilinguing, who said he was writing a status update when he was logged out of his account due to "suspicious activity."
"My feeling is that someone tried to access my account by claiming to have forgotten my password. And then instead of being provided a new password to a false email account, Facebook alerted me by logging me off and making me review my activities," he told ABS-CBN.
It prompted netizens to think that a self-confessed pro-Duterte group had something to do with it.
The group posted on Facebook a call for the surveillance of people who are supposedly trying to influence young people into believing anti-Marcos rhetoric.
Since then, students from the Ateneo de Manila University, which was one of the first schools to protest the Marcos burial, have had their accounts "compromised."
User Jan-Daniel Belmonte, whose account was also compromised, has found more than 200 other victims, most of whom are students from Ateneo and the University of the Philippines.
The verified personal Facebook account of veteran journalist Inday Espina-Varona was also disabled by Facebook on Monday, without any explanation, for several hours.
Her account was restored, as of 11:30 p.m. Monday night.
Elizabeth Hernandez, Facebook's head of public policy in the Asia Pacific, told Espina-Varona in an email that her verified account "was incorrectly enrolled in a fake name checkpoint."
"Your account has been cleared from this checkpoint," Hernandez said.
Following reports of Filipino Facebook users getting locked out of their accounts, the social networking site also gave some tips on how to secure them.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
