LONG POST ALERT
Okay, I've put together some more information and a timeline on the Facebook hack because this just gets funnier and funnier the more I learn, as well as a detailed breakdown of the hack itself and what happened. At the end I’ve given my opinion on what I think will happen in the near future.
All dates & times are EST.
Thursday, 5/22
The vlog is posted to Fathering Autism's Facebook and Youtube accounts at 6pm as usual.
**They may have lost control of their business accounts overnight Thursday into Friday.**
Friday, 5/23
No vlog is posted to the Facebook account. A vlog is posted to Youtube. This & the lack of Saturday FB vlog are my primary reasons for believing that Asa was removed as admin from the business pages overnight Thursday into Friday - HOWEVER, due to other evidence Tattlers inadvertently gathered, there is a chance that the accounts were lost later.
Friday, 5/23 into Saturday, 5/24
Asa & Priscilla drive overnight from Jacksonville to Miami - a more than 5 hour drive - because their flight from JAX was canceled. Saturday morning they fly to St Maarten for the Slimelife cult gathering.
Saturday, 5/24
No vlog is posted to FB. A vlog is posted to Youtube.
- Early in the morning the Pots Pans & Priscilla Instagram account posts updates about having to drive to Miami overnight and a photo from the plane out of Miami.
- 11:05am EST:
@therealamylynn notices that Priscilla's personal non-business Facebook page 'Priscilla Plaggenburg Maass' is gone & posts about it here. At the time everything appeared normal so we joked about her deactivating or privating her account so she couldn't be tagged in unfiltered photos from St MartEEn. A good time was had by all!
-
@TamCamp is able to screenshot a post on the Priscilla Plaggenburg Maass account at 10:46am EST, approximately 20 minutes before
@therealamylynn noticed the account was gone, indicating that P's account was still active up through Saturday morning. This screenshot may potentially indicate that the accounts were taken over Saturday morning before 11:05am.
Sunday, 5/25
No vlog is posted to FB. A vlog is posted to Youtube.
- The PP&P Insta account posts a "good morning from St Maarten" story, then a few beach pics & the hilariously compact rental car pic stories, then a short lunch video story.
- A few photos from other Huns & ManHuns with A&P in them are posted to social media.
Monday, 5/26
No vlogs are posted.
- 6:58am EST:
@SunnyDale notices that the Pots Pans & Priscilla Facebook account has had its name and profile picture changed, immediately suspecting a hack. According to screenshots and posts from replies on the Fathering Autism Facebook page, the page's name change occurred shortly before 7am EST.
- We joked about the PP&P hack and a good time was had by all. Humpers are going nuts on the Fathering Autism FB in replies.
- 9:33am EST:
@Cardinal Rule discovers a reply in the FA FB fracas from Asa posting under Isaiah's account:
"...it happened days ago but they just now changed the name. They have all our pages because they got her (Priscilla's) personal FB account."
- 10:02am EST:
@boychik0830 screencaps a story from the Fathering Autism Instagram account with more details about the hacking situation. Asa claims that Priscilla's personal FB page was hijacked "2 days ago" (which brings us back to late Friday night/early Saturday morning when the Priscilla Plaggenburg Maass FB account suddenly disappeared between 10:46-11:05am EST) and that they removed Asa as admin - and therefore any access - on Fathering Autism, Lipstick Mama, Pots Pans & Priscilla, and More Maass. He says his Insta account is still linked to Facebook.
-
(while his claim of 2 days ago/Saturday morning as the time of the hack does line up with what we saw publicly, I struggle to see any reason why he posted a Fathering Autism vlog to Youtube on Friday but not on Facebook. He makes a good chunk of change from Facebook. He may have been too exhausted, too busy packing, and/or panicking about their JAX flight being canceled to have posted the vlog to FB but....money. It doesn't really matter either way, I just like to know stuff.)
- The new name of Pots Pans & Priscilla is Biznesnachrichten - Nachrichten is German for news, biznes is used in several languages to mean business. Per some research I’m able to do I believe that the hack is Russian or old Soviet in nature.
- Humpers continue to freak out all day in the comments of the last Fathering Autism FB post. Asa can do nothing but reply using Isaiah’s FB account. He cannot delete any comments.
- Monday evening the Pots Pans & Priscilla Instagram account posts a couple stories of them smiling during some sort of motor boat activity. They had to take a 3 person motor boat for the two of them because weight limits are a thing that exists. All is quiet otherwise.
Tuesday, 5/26
No vlog is posted to FB. A vlog is posted to Youtube ("Sleepless Nights and Autism"). This vlog was filmed very early in the morning on Friday, 5/23 (i.e. probably somewhere around 3am their time) as Asa says they're supposed to get on a plane in 36 hours.
The initial account takeover may have happened shortly before or during filming while he was up dealing with Abbie.
- We get numerous photos from other Huns and ManHuns featuring Asa & Priscilla, including Asa in his cowboy hat in an attempt to add a couple inches to his height. He looks ridiculous. All is quiet otherwise on the Maass front - no Insta stories, no more replies on FB, no further visible activity on their hijacked Facebook accounts.
Wednesday, 5/27 - today
The Pots Pans & Priscilla Facebook page was further "re-branded" with the profile picture and cover photo both updated at 5:43am EST. The profile photo is a stylized BN and the cover photo reads NACHRCHTEN (news) over a blue background with a globe and arced lines. This style emulates international news websites. The page location was changed to Munich, Germany and the Page Manager location is now listed as Ukraine. Page commenting appears to have been disabled sometime Monday. Comments advising people to block the page were deleted.
What does it all meeeeeaaannn?? And what happens now?
This is a Russian hack as I suspected. A grammatical error was made by the hackers which is commonly seen in native Russian speakers communicating in some language families, and using that hint I was able to suss out a few more hints online and then arrive at my hypothesis. Wednesday’s re-branding of PP&P solidified it for me.
They were hit by a particularly nasty hack. These bad actors (BAs for short from here on out) are very good at what they do and know all of Facebook's weak points.
What happened is that after Asa got their Youtube channels hacked, a skeleton key of sorts which was created from that hack was put up for sale on the proverbial black market. This skeleton key allows BAs to appear to Facebook’s servers to actually be Asa or Priscilla using their account. It bypasses the need for passwords and, worse, 2FA methods. The skeleton key for their Facebook accounts is worth quite a lot of money. You can get 1000 skeleton keys of basic user accounts with 100 friends for like $75. Asa’s skeleton key gives the BAs access to their aged, verified business pages with about 2 million followers total.
- At some point - either very late Thursday night or fairly early Saturday morning - the BAs took over the Priscilla Plaggenburg Maass account.
- All of their business FB pages were “created by” the Priscilla Plaggenburg Maass account, therefore tied to her personal account. Asa doesn’t have an account of his own and didn’t bother to set up a separate personal account; he just used Priscilla’s to create Fathering Autism, More Maass, Pots Pans & Priscilla, and Lipstick Mama.
- Once the BAs were ready to take over, they added themselves as admins to the business pages and then removed the Maass account(s) as admin. It’s unclear if only Priscilla’s personal account was used for this or if Asa eventually got himself a dummy account to use for administration but the outcome is the same.
- Here’s the nasty part, and what I’m sure Asa does not understand. Once the BAs had admin control over the business pages, they nuked the Priscilla Plaggenburg Maass account. They spam-posted (and, mind you, to Facebook servers this all looks like it’s fully coming from Maass devices using proper Maass credentials) a torrent of horrendous images onto Priscilla’s personal account. They might have been very gruesome images, they might have been graphic adult images, they might have been CSAM. Whatever those images were, the intended goal is for Meta’s automated AI filtering system to pick up on the fact that horrendous images are being posted and to IMMEDIATELY deactivate the offending account for violating TOS.
- With the Priscilla Plaggenburg Maass account now TOS deactivated only the BAs have access to those business pages. Often with hacks like this on basic accounts the BAs immediately post crypto scams or some other quick turnaround money scam. They didn’t do that with these valuable accounts they now control. They waited 2 full days before starting to make visible changes, 4 full days (today) before really digging in on the 2nd tier account. These BAs are going for the long game.
Asa seems to be under the impression that he’s just gonna get home, send a few emails to Meta, and get his Facebook pages back.
He’s not.
Point 4 above, the image posting, is going to fuck them both hard.
Those pages are now no longer tied to the Facebook account that created them. The Facebook account that created them is gone. The worst thing you can do on Facebook is to post gore, porn, or illegal imagery. There’s an outside chance that, if you can prove to Meta that you were really hacked, maybe after months and months of trying you can get that account back. Maybe. But remember: the hack these BAs used appears to Meta’s servers to not be a hack at all. It all looks like it came from the Maass’ devices using their wifi on accounts they’ve remained logged in to.
Thousands and thousands of business pages have succumbed to this same type of hack, including getting the creating personal account nuked.
Meta does not care. Most of those pages are never recovered, the previous owners stuck in an endless cycle of appealing and verifying and AI support responses until that personal account times out from deactivated to outright deleted. Once it’s deleted those business pages can never, ever, ever be recovered.
The Maass SoCiAl MeDiA eNtErPrIsE does not make enough money for Meta for them to care about this hack. As far as they’re concerned Priscilla spammed a bunch of nasty shit to her page. People do that all the time. Meta doesn’t allocate the resources for human review of every case of “hack or tantrum?” Her account posted beheaded bodies or buttholes or..…other stuff and Meta does not want that on their platform so they deleted her shit.
He legitimately may never get those business pages back. This is different than Google/Youtube. Meta is a whole other animal, one that doesn’t need to worry about customer service. People who have spent $2 million per year advertising on Facebook - as in they have given FB $2m to run their own advertisements - have been taken over by this same hack and they never got their accounts or business pages back. Facebook isn’t gonna jump to attention for Asa Maass.
So what happens now? That’s what everyone is asking.
I have a strong suspicion, given today’s re-branding, that their business pages are going to be used this year to disseminate “news.”
News is intentionally in quotes.
Everyone should be aware by now that Facebook is a crucible for the spread of mis- and disinformation of all sorts. While my expertise lies in tracking and monitoring the shit on other platforms I’ve done work on the Facebook side and I’m all too aware of how stolen pages exactly like this are used.
If I’m correct about the BAs intent, and if the BAs are able to maintain control of the pages long enough, they’ll soon “re-brand” at least Fathering Autism into either a “news” page or a meme page. Those two pages have the most followers so the algorithm will favor shares from them.
A bot farm will take over posting duties churning out AI generated images, links to external sites purporting to be shocking news stories (which are also AI generated), rage bait, targeted memes, anything that gets people riled up. Because these are aged, real, verified pages the algorithm will push the content out to a greater number of people.
And because these pages will get interactions from an even wider base than it already has, the page manager will have access to some personal and demographic information about millions and millions of additional people. That sort of data is valuable in and of itself for many reasons and it’s scooped up effortlessly by bots also controlled by the BAs controlling these pages.
Again, if I’m correct, I may get to watch what I’ve been studying for the last 9 years happen step by step in real time. I’ve never been able to see it from this angle before. Not many people have.
Of course, I want to include a
disclaimer: this is not a guarantee. I cannot be positive that these pages will be used in this manner. The BAs may wait a few weeks and pop up a crypto scam, or do that tonight, or not wind up doing anything with the pages. Asa may be one of the very rare lucky ones who are able to wrestle their account and pages back.
What I can guarantee, though, is that Asa will return from St Maarten and walk into an absolute shitshow in terms of trying to recover all of their Facebook stuff. This is going to age him. He’s going to lose a ton of money not just in lost Facebook revenue but in labor to even try to fix this. He probably won’t be able to fix it. He’ll likely spend months trying.