14 March 2024, 10:11 | Update: 11:35 a. m.
Vintage Seattle site. (Old Seattle)
(Old Seattle)
BY FELIKS BANEL
Hackers have taken over a Facebook organization run by local volunteers to share photographs and stories about Seattle’s history.
The now-hacked page is called “Seattle Vintage. ” Remember Facebook’s organic grassroots teams or projects founded and led by volunteers to celebrate local history in their respective communities around the world.
Late last week, hackers posing as the page’s administrators — Facebook users and members of the organization who have privileged access to manage the page and add accepted and rejected posts — took over Seattle Vintage. They kicked out all valid admins from the page and started making adjustments. to the content, possibly as a precursor to some sort of attempt to “sell” administrative access to the page to other hackers.
Doug Palmer retired after a long career in Seattle-area retail. He is a long-time member of Seattle Vintage and posts on the page. Once he realized what was going on, he began investigating what appeared to be two Americans guilty of the hacking attack.
“After he started looking up their names on the internet,” Palmer told KIRO Newsradio, he decided “that they had seized and then resold at least another 30 pages. “
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By “reselling,” Palmer says he believes there’s a market for pages with a giant following. The pattern, according to Palmer, is to access the page through the page’s admin feature and then to valid admins. The hackers can then replace the page’s call themselves or sell administrative access to some other malicious party who will then use the page to create promotional posts for a certain type of product or service, most likely unrelated to the content posted on the page. Pirated.
To be clear, there is no “black market” for Seattle’s history; The page’s value to hackers lies in Seattle Vintage’s 155,000 subscribers, most of whom probably still have no idea that Seattle Vintage has been hacked for some purpose.
However, many Seattle Vintage users are aware of this and have attempted to report the hack to Facebook. Unfortunately, Palmer says, there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism within Facebook’s formula for accurately reporting what happened to Seattle Vintage.
Facebook’s inability to provide such a mechanism hasn’t deterred Palmer.
“I posted comments on [Facebook founder and CEO] Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, on Facebook’s Facebook and Twitter accounts; I reached out to Kim Schrier, my [Congress] representative, on her contact form; and [Senator] Maria Cantwell; [and] the Division of Consumer Protection in Washington, the attorney general’s office,” Palmer said. “I also touched the FBI. “
“The only reaction I’ve had so far is when I reported the two profiles” of the hackers, Palmer said. The Facebook bot replied to me and said that those other two people “didn’t violate our network standards, so they didn’t delete their profiles. “
Palmer also tried to find out where the hackers are, but it proved tricky.
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“The two hackers claim to be based in Berlin and involve a call from a fake company that doesn’t show up in any search,” Palmer said. “And his WhatsApp account number is registered with a cell phone operator in Kyiv, Ukraine. “Palmer continued, “If I Google the calls of the two hackers in combination and separately, I get two women who went to school and university in the Kashmir district of Pakistan. “
Meanwhile, the founders of Seattle Vintage, now hacked, have introduced a new organization and page called “Seattle Vintage 2. 0. “As of Thursday morning, it had just under 1,000 subscribers, or 155,000 still.
That number of fans and resource that the original Seattle Vintage had represents countless hours of serious and considerate work by thousands of Facebook users who shared photographs and stories on the page and, yes, probably hundreds of thousands of hours of intelligence. old times. The scroll was formed through many other users of the page.
David Ruble grew up in Seattle and is one of the most prolific posters on the original Seattle Vintage page.
“Over the last five years, I’ve had a lot of private stories, artwork, you know, old vignettes,” Ruble told KIRO Newsradio on Wednesday night.
“One of the very special things about Seattle Vintage is that we see all of this as an area where we can share our personal reports and our collective reports,” Ruble continued.
Ruble is proud of the paintings he puts in his posts for Seattle Vintage and the responses he gets over the years, as other people “liked” his posts, made comments, or shared images in conversations with Ruble and other “interesting” Facebook users. users. with the content.
“Last Friday, I had 330,000 interactions on Seattle Vintage through my stories, and that’s a huge loss,” Ruble said.
Like Doug Palmer and many others, once he became aware of the existence of the hackers, Ruble deleted all of their content from the previous page.
“It’s hard to remove them, let me tell you,” Ruble said, “but I didn’t need my original content to fall into the hands of foreign cybercriminals. “
As he recounts what he has experienced in recent days, Ruble, in his 60s, seems discouraged but also defiant.
“They can borrow the site, but they’ll never have the network; they can’t borrow from us,” Ruble said. “And I think that’s the point. We can start over with a new site and we’ve started over with a new site, they’ll never be able to borrow the network that we have.
KIRO Newsradio reached out to Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s office for their reaction to this development and to see if any Washington laws or customer coverage policies have been violated, or if Facebook could simply take steps to provide Seattle’s real administrators with more help for the problem. We have not yet received a response.
This is a short story and will be updated.
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