Cybercriminals hack Ukraïner's Facebook page
Ukraïner, an educational project about the Ukrainian society and culture, has been hacked: cyber criminals took over the project's Facebook pages. The project reported this on Instagram.
"Friends, our Facebook pages have been taken over by hackers. Both Ukraïner's main page and all our non-Ukrainian language pages are controlled by unknown persons," the post says.
The project's team notes that they are looking for any way to regain full control over the account, and warns that if there are any strange posts on the pages in the near future, or the names of the pages change, etc., it is not their doing.
"Please do not click any links that may be posted on our pages or sent to you in private messages. Do not send any money, because we are currently not doing any fundraising (the army auction where we invited you to support our volunteer Mykhailo, ended today)," the message reads.
Ukraïner noted that for the time being, they will be posting content on Instagram, Telegram, Twitter and Viber.
The project's founder, Bohdan Logvynenko, tweeted that hackers had gained access to the publication's pages by hacking the Meta Business Manager.
"Ladies and gentlemen, yesterday (February 24 – Ed.) Ukraïner's Meta Business Manager was hacked. All pages have been breached. There may be provocations. They are already changing names and deleting posts. Meta Support has provided no help since yesterday. The Digital Ministry is aware of the situation," he wrote.
At the same time, he added on Facebook, a preliminary check did not reveal any signs of the administrators' personal pages being hacked.
"We were hacked, but a preliminary check of our personal pages shows that there has been no attack on the admins themselves. From the insiders in "Meta": probably some gaps appeared in the Business Manager and there is simply no operational capacity to solve such problems. And even if the hacker attack happened due to an administrative error – it could take months (!) to fix a page hack. Seeing how quick the support is to respond and the how one has to have ties in Meta to 'talk things through', it is obvious that Facebook is the most risky place for communicating and accumulating social clout while there is an information war," Logvynenko wrote.
He added that Ukraïner will probably have to leave Facebook.
"At the start of the invasion, we tried to authorize our pages and resist the bans brought about by Russian bot farms, having all the documents, a trademark, a huge audience – to no avail. But we were authorized and 'white listed' immediately after noting that we would probably have to leave these platforms. If you are just starting your brand, skip Meta. If Facebook pages are your main sources of communication, slowly move over to other platforms," Logvynenko wrote.
Ukraïner is a team and organization that has been researching Ukraine and the Ukrainian context since 2016, telling the stories to Ukrainians themselves and broadcasting them to the world, translating them into dozens of languages. With the beginning of Russia's full-scale war on Ukraine, Ukraïner revamped all their communication channels and started writing about the war and overcoming the disasters caused by the occupying forces. Stories about the indomitability of Ukrainians, told in different languages on different platforms, have become one of the most important priorities for the team.
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