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What is the best facebook friend adder?

Did a friend try to hack into my Facebook?

  • Recently, Facebook wouldn't let me log in, claiming I had made too many login attempts. But I wasn't even online during the alleged attempts. A geek friend says it's a sign that someone who knew the email address associated with my account was trying to get into it. Is there another explanation? The email address (formerly!) associated with my account was known only to my friends. You had to be my Facebook "friend" to see it. It's the address I used for personal emails to people I know in real life as well as for occasional travel arrangements. It's possible that it escaped into the wild, but a Google search for it turned up one lonely mention in a public forum where a friend unhelpfully said to the entire world, "If you need to know more about X, email Ceiba at HerPrivateAddress.Com." That leaves a few possibilities, as far as I can tell: 1. One of my real-life friends was trying to get into my account. My geek friend says this is the most likely. 2. A spammer's robot got my email from that one public mention, from hacking a friends' contact book, or from whatever it is that robots do and was trying to get into Facebook to post spammy links. (As far as I know, I don't get spam at the address, but I've got a killer spam filter.) 3. A spammer's robot guessed the somewhat weird email address. 4. A stranger who works at a hotel where I recently made a reservation tried to get in, but why? 5. Facebook hiccupped and there really weren't any login attempts. "Active sessions" under the "Security" tab showed only my logins, but since the hacker didn't get in, it wouldn't have registered as a session, as I understand it. I use different randomly generated passwords from 1Password for each site. Since the apparent break-in attempt, I've changed the Facebook password again, set up a gibberish email address for Facebook only, and removed the connection to my personal email address. My question: Is the most likely explanation that a real-life friend was trying to get in? There's no major drama in my life but I can think of a couple of people who have that email address and who might want to get more info than they can see on my Facebook page, but I don't like to think that they're creepy enough to do this. Thanks!

  • Answer:

    The things you listed in #2 are all extremely common. Many people are not careful with whom they share their address book. And if your e-mail address has ever seen the light of day on the web, that would be the major culprit. Any e-mail address that you actually use will eventually get on some list.

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You recently log in from someone else's computer? It could be possible that your account name was being prefilled in there still and they then tried "their" password over and over until your account got locked.

bottlebrushtree

Stuff like this can happen pretty regularly, no malice intended, if you use a common email provider and someone slightly mistypes their email when trying to login. Say, someone who has [email protected] instead of [email protected] mistyped their email into facebook when trying to log in, and just clicked back a bunch and reentered a password instead of re-typing the email too. As a [email protected] email address holder I get this, and variations on this not irregularly, and this is probably what I would assume if I don't have a personalized email domain (IE [email protected] as opposed to [email protected]). Otherwise, yeah, a few things are possible but I would really not jump to a friendor other known induvudual trying to log in as you without some other evidence. Much more likely in my experience is #2, and in that list of possibilities is that your email got hacked, so you should change that password as well just to be on the safe side, or that they spammed a bunch of emails to see which ones got bounce backs, or whatever. There are lots of ways for that to happen.

McSwaggers

I once accidentally locked some random person's bank account, because I kept trying to log in with an account number one digit different than mine. I'm sure I freaked them out, but it really was an error.

Specklet

You can also login in with your facebook username, which is less hidden.

mhp

I got that message earlier today, and had never seen it on Facebook before that, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's been an upswing in either #2 or #5 lately.

songs about trains

Do you have an old ex that knows the e-mail address that you use for the account? I know I've tried to log into an ex's Facebook years after the fact just to see what they were up to.

Autumn

Just to clarify: The email address was [email protected]. It's not a common domain and doesn't end in .com or dot-anything normal. People had a lot of trouble understanding it; I usually just emailed them from the address so they would have it.

ceiba

I was about to suggest what bottlebrushtree mentioned.

xedrik

I got that message for the first time yesterday, so I agree with songs about trains that it might be something that has nothing to do with you specifically. (I was still logged in elsewhere on another browser, and was able to proceed with using Facebook there without any issue.)

sueinnyc

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