• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Activist Group Hijacks Facebook Group Pages

Posted on: Wednesday, 11 November 2009, 11:30 CST

An activist group claiming to highlight security flaws with the online social networking site Facebook has hijacked almost 300 groups.

“Our main goal is to draw attention to questions concerning online privacy awareness,” the group, known as Control Your Info, said in a statement on its Web site.

“We discovered that many groups on Facebook are left without an administrator. All we needed to find these groups was one quick Google search. The search results also revealed many groups that already had been hijacked by various people. Their intentions remain unclear.”

“So we simply joined 289 open groups and made ourselves administrators,” the group said.

“We did not hack anything.”

The group added that once they gained administrative access to the Facebook groups, the options were limitless as they could change any information held on the group’s page.

“We chose to change the picture, the name and the description of every group,” CYI said. “Our intention was and is to restore these groups to their original form and find a suitable admin among the members. To be able to do this, we first backed up all the data we wanted to replace.”

CYI sent out messages to members of the hijacked groups, clearly stating their objective was to highlight the security flaws of the social networking site.

"Group administrators have no access to private user information and group members can leave a group at any time," Facebook said.

"In the rare instances when we find that a group has been changed inappropriately, we will disable the group, which is the action we plan for these groups."

---

On the Net:

• Control Your Info
• Facebook

Source: RedOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

More News in this Category