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I have a question about my Information Security Stack Exchange post: I have been a victim, but of what?

This is the timeline of what happened to my question:

Tuesday, 03:20 PM: I wrote a question on Information Security SE that I thought was squarely on-topic there. (In short, it boiled down to "What kind of malicious activity was I targetted for, based on how the attack was conducted?")

Unfortunately, the site would not let me post the full details at first, saying that my post "looks like spam". Thus, in order to post my question, I considerably shortened it by just outlining the case.

As I was concerned my question was going to be downvoted for lack of clarity/detail, I appended a note to point out that I was not too lazy to summarize more information on the case, but that I was just currently prevented from posting it due to SE's spam filter.

Based on that note, a user helpfully suggested to migrate the post to the meta site while shifting the focus of the question away from the actual information security question toward the meta-topic of the site's spam filter issue.

Tuesday, 04:30 PM: I finally found out that I could still publish the initial version of my question with full details by gradually expanding the question in edits. Now that the full details had been added, the spam filter was not an issue to me anymore, and I consequently removed the respective remark.

IMHO, at this point, my question was fully on-topic for Information Security SE (or wasn't it?).

Wednesday, 10:40 AM: My question was migrated to the Meta site.

Wednesday, 11:24 AM: I flagged my question for moderator attention, indicating that I thought at the time it was migrated to Meta, it shouldn't have been migrated anymore, because it didn't contain any meta-issue anymore.

Wednesday, 06:31 PM: My question was closed for being off-topic on the Meta site.

What can I do now?

  • Wait until my flag is treated (will it still be treated, now that the question is closed?) and hope for the question to be migrated back to the main site and reopened?
  • Just repost the same question again on the Information Security site?
  • Anything else?

(All of this assuming that my original question was on-topic on the main site, but reading the on-topic list it seems spot-on.)

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  • The reason your question got migrated was that the question received three votes to migrate to meta and 2 to close for other reasons. However, the system chooses the close reason with the highest number of votes so the question was migrated. For the rest see Rory Alsop's answer.
    – nobody
    Dec 31, 2020 at 10:39
  • @nobody: "The reason your question got migrated was that the question received three votes to migrate to meta" - totally clear. But note that, as described here, the initial idea and (at least!) the first vote to migrate were based on a secondary aspect of the question that has been entirely removed since. And that, I should note, was never intended to be the core of the question anyway. For the rest, see my comment on Rory Alsop's answer.
    – Attacked 2020
    Dec 31, 2020 at 14:57

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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The question falls within our off topic reasons - there is no answer we can give here that would be different to the ones we give for any "This looks like I have been hacked" post:

  • If you are concerned, change passwords etc, patch, update
  • If you are really concerned, get a forensic investigator in
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  • My apologies. It was my impression that questions about which malicious activites go together with which attack vectors are on-topic here. As per the help center, I thought such questions would match the listed points "risk management" and "incident response".
    – Attacked 2020
    Dec 31, 2020 at 14:54
  • Your question is "Is that a typical attack pattern, or what exactly happened there?" - sorry, literally no way for us to answer either bit of that. A question has to be structured as per the guidance, answerable, specific etc.
    – Rory Alsop Mod
    Dec 31, 2020 at 15:04

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