In what appears to be a relatively well planned campaign to build awareness about online security, a group of users (or one individual who has multiple accounts) are systematically going through Facebook Groups which don’t have administrator privileges and taking them over. The individuals, who have accounts under the names “Janis Roukkos” and “Bella Roregit”, change the image for each group and then post a copy of the message and video posted below.

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 inappropriate 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

The loose wire blog which originally discovered the issue, is describing the individual or group as “hackers”. While this wasn’t necessarily a complex hack, it’s causing problems for those groups which no longer have an administrator. Then again, many of the groups which have been hijacked don’t appear to be extremely active so I’m not sure if the group members have even noticed.

What’s most significant about this hack is the amount of effort the individual or group put into creating a landing page which describes steps users can take to protect themselves online. While it doesn’t appear to be a branded campaign, it’s surely generating a lot of buzz around the web. I’ve reached out to Erik Hjort who is the registered owner of the site and will update this post if we hear back. You can check out the Control Your Info site for more information.