Each morning after breakfast I start my work day by reading email messages to see what needs my attention or is urgent. This security message from Facebook stood out right away as something that I should look into right away:
The return address was from security@facebook.com, they knew my first name, the English was proper, the message made sense, and the link they wanted me to click was legitimate, https://www.facebook.com/login/. I certainly didn’t try to login to Facebook at 3:24AM using the Firefox browser on Windows 8, because my default browser is Google Chrome on Mac OS X.
Once I visited the login page I was greeted with a dialog telling me that my Facebook account was temporarily locked:
The next dialog asked if I had tried to login on Facebook from South Korea, so I replied No. The third dialog let me know that my account needed to be kept secure:
They asked me to provide a new password:
New password accepted, so now I’m all set:
Summary
The security folks at Facebook automatically noticed that someone was trying to login to my account from South Korea, which they blocked, and then for added security Facebook locked my account until I could respond to their email request to login and answer questions about my login history. I feel protected by Facebook and am quite happy to reset my password and continue using Facebook today. I did quickly look at my Facebook feed to double check that nothing had been posted as me by another person, and found the feed to be all safe. What a happy ending to the story.
