Facebook goes after 2 Bangladeshi hacker groups

Social networking giant Facebook has identified two hacker groups in Bangladesh who were using the platform to compromise accounts of social activists, religious minority groups and journalists.

In a press release, Nathaniel Gleicher, head of Security Policy of Facebook and Mike Dvilyanski, Cyber Threat Intelligence manager of the company, announced that the platform had taken action against the groups.

"The Bangladesh-based group targeted local activists, journalists and religious minorities, including those living abroad, to compromise their accounts and have some of them disabled by Facebook for violating our Community Standards.

“Our investigation linked this activity to two non-profit organizations in Bangladesh: Don’s Team [also known as Defense of Nation] and the Crime Research and Analysis Foundation [CRAF]. They appeared to be operating across a number of internet services," said the release.

Don’s Team and CRAF collaborated to report people on Facebook for fictitious violations of our Community Standards, including alleged impersonation, intellectual property infringements, nudity and terrorism, it continues.

"They also hacked people’s accounts and pages, and used some of these compromised accounts for their own operational purposes, including to amplify their content. On at least one occasion, after a page admin’s account was compromised, they removed the remaining admins to take over and disable the page.

“Our investigation suggests that these targeted hacking attempts were likely carried out through a number of off-platform tactics including email and device compromise and abuse of our account recovery process," reads the release.

"To disrupt this activity, we removed the accounts and pages behind this operation. We shared information about this group with our industry partners so they too can detect and stop this activity.

We encourage people to remain vigilant and take steps to protect their accounts, avoid clicking on suspicious links and downloading software from untrusted sources that can compromise their devices and information stored on them," it added.