The CCL Was Hacked

What's the CCL? It's the Facebook group Chess Club Live. I've posted about them twice: the first time in Chess and Social Trends (October 2016), and the second time in A Short History of CCL (March 2017). Along with dozens (hundreds?) of other chess related items, they publish posts from this blog and from my World Chess Championship blog. A couple of weeks ago my blog statistics told me that the blog feeds had stopped. I contacted Michael Mkpadi, the main man behind CCL and one of those types of people who has a dozen novel ideas every day, and asked him what the problem was. He replied,

Facebook got hacked, I got hacked, my page got hacked. Now I've lost my admin rights and am trying to get Facebook to restore my page.

When I asked him what the prognosis was for CCL's return to service, he replied,

Facebook are a law to themselves, not sure I know what they'll do about that page other than keeping it in limbo for an eternity.

A few days later he messaged me that CCL was back and, sure enough, it was. Here's a screen capture I took while writing this post.

That hack wasn't just the CCL: Facebook just had its worst hack ever -- and it could get worse (cnn.com; 4 October 2018).

On Sunday, September 16, engineers at Facebook detected some unusual activity on the social media platform's networks. It was an attack, the biggest security breach in Facebook's history. And it would take the company 11 more days to stop it. Now, almost a week since the public was first told of the attack, we still barely know anything about what happened.

It's a dangerous world out there. Even online chess clubs have to keep looking over their shoulders.