It looks like quite a number of Facebook groups have been hijacked by a hacker with hijinks in mind? No, the Facebook groups that have been hijacked was under the name of security purpose, with an intention to highlight the apparent flaw in the Facebook group itself.

Searching for “Control Your Info,” users will find some Facebook groups that have been hijacked carried some common characteristics. Firstly, the group’s “Basic Info”, was altered, but the “Contact Info” of the actual creator of the hijacked Facebook group remained as the same. Secondly, the group’s profile picture has been changed to “Control Your Info” logo, as shown in the below picture. If you belonged to that particular hijacked Facebook group, you know this was not the group profile picture it has week(s) ago.

Frankly, it’s still tough to tell what has exactly happened, how the groups have been hijacked other than the statement appeared on the Wall of the Facebook groups that being hijacked, as follows:

Hello, we hereby announce that we have officially hijacked your Facebook group.

This means we control a certain part of the information about you on Facebook. If we wanted we could make you appear in a bad way which could damage your image severly.

For example we could rename your group and call it something very inapp…ropriate and nasty, like “I support pedophile’s rights”. But have no fear – we won’t. We just renamed it Control Your Info. Because this is really all we want:

Think about the safety in your social media life to the same extent you do in your real life. Watch the videoclip for more information or check out www.controlyour.info for more tips soon!

We promise to restore your group name and leave the group by the end of next week. Don’t worry – we won’t mess anything up.

Best regards

/controlyour.info

Apart from this, notice that the name attached to the message was Bella Roregit, or Burstin Woltan.

Additionally, it’s also early to tell the actual number of the Facebook groups that being hijacked. But a possibility of at least 289 groups have been affected, according to the blog of Control Your Info.

On the Control Your Info blog page, it posting, “So, what exactly did we do and how?

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. We did not hack anything. Once we were administrators we owned the groups and could have changed any setting. We chose to change the picture, the name and the description of every group. 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.”

More as this develops, the latest update is that Facebook has denied such a security flaw.

“There has been no hijacking and there is no confidential information at risk,” the company stated. “The groups in question have been abandoned by their previous owners, which means any group member has the option to make themselves an administrator in order to continue communication to the group.”

“Group administrators have no access to private user information and group members can leave a group at any time. For small groups, administrators can simply edit a group name or info, moderate discussion and message group members.”

“The names of large groups cannot be changed nor can anyone message all members. In the rare instances when we find a group has been changed inappropriately, we will disable the group, which is the action we plan for these groups,” Facebook said.

In fact, this is not the first time Facebook has been a target for hijacking. As the world’s top social network, Facebook is still a number one target for whatsoever cybercriminal activities. As such, it’s imperative for the Administrators of Facebook group to continue monitoring the security issues of the group in order to protect the site integrity.

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