Tuesday, November 10, 2009

250+ Facebook Groups Hijacked. Reason – To Raise Social Awareness


In my last post 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.

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