Facebook Hacked

Last week we reported about one of the vulnerabilities of Facebook being pointed out by a developer and there is one more coming this week but this time it is being highlighted in a subtle way. A group calling themselves as Control Your Info have hacked or taken over (as explained by the group itself) around 300 Facebook Groups by taking advantage of one of the major design flaw of Facebook. After hacking the Facebook group they are changing the name of the group to Control Your Info (and not any vulgar names). They have posted everything on their website about the way and their intention of doing this.

First of all what’s the flaw all about? Any Facebook user can create Facebook group and the person who created it becomes the admin of the group. If by any chance admin has left the group, anybody can take-over as the admin of the group and do whatever he/she wants to do with that group. Facebook doesn’t have the any sort of mechanism to automatically elect new admin from within the group. Take for example the most active member of the group can be made the new admin (my way of choosing admin). I am little bit skeptical on the capabilities of Facebook testers as this is the basic functionality or may be this is how Facebook intended to have this feature.

And why Control Your Info is doing this? They are saying that this is a way of doing a social service to raise awareness of the vulnerabilities of the social media just by highlighting flaw of Facebook. They add on by saying that this is a good cause and they are not getting any profit out of it. They have also changed the group description (in the pic below) of the hijacked groups and have sent messages to the group members assuring them that they will restore the group back to normal by next week

What a novice way to raise awareness (if they are actually releasing the group)? Facebook has taken down Control your Info’s fan page but if you support their cause you can go to their You Tube channel and leave your comments.

But I have a doubt how they are finding Facebook groups without any admin. They told that making quick search on Google could do this. I don’t know how you can find this by Google search (if anyone of you are aware of this, please let me know).I feel that all the groups that are being taken over may have the admin, which were associated with this cause. Then, they all left these respective groups at the same time hence making it easy and fast paces for “Control Your Info” hijack those groups. Just watch the video below from Control Your Info.

Have your say, let us know what do you think about this whole issue and then last “Rss subscribe” and E-Mail newsletter thing.

Update: I can’t contain my curiosity , so we mailed Control Your Info in order to seek clarification on finding Facebook Groups without an admin using Google Search. This is what we mailed to them

Hi Control Your Info Cult,
We have recently published about your Facebook Group Hack. We appreciate your cause and the initiative you have taken to make Facebook more secure.

We have doubt related to your hack and would request you to please clarify the same for our readers.
Question- How were you able to find out groups on Facebook whose Admins had left their respective groups?

An early reply would be appreciated as we will be able to update our reader about it.

Thanks for the great work.

Regards,
TechDusts Crew

http://techdusts.com

They replied to our mail within one hour but still without any explanation of my query  (Anybody please help me out in clearing up this doubt of mine). This is what they have to say

Hello!

We have been overwhelmed with response. It’s already night in Stockholm, and we will get back as soon as possible.

Kind Regards,
The Controlyour.info Team.

(For those interested, our website will soon be updated with a new statement about what we did and why we did it)

Breaking News: Control Your Info is operating from Stockholm, Sweden.

Facebook Group Hacked

Image Credits: naviarora.blogspot.com