News platform’s Facebook page hacked, year worth of content deleted

An online news platform in Azerbaijan, had its Facebook page hacked by unknown hackers. The incident was reported by the editor-in-chief Samira Gasimli via a Facebook post.

Translation: “Dear RLC followers, For the past two months we have been working on new shows and formats. We are getting ready to release new, more interesting, and different formats. If you have noticed, we have stopped sharing shows on our channel as a result. Despite the inactive channel, a few days ago, RLC’s Facebook page was hacked and all of the content shared in the past year was deleted, its format was changed, and so was the profile picture. We have experienced previous interventions to our Facebook page admin panel but we were able to mitigate the risk. We have reached out to Facebook in the meantime, requesting to reinstate all of the content that was deleted. The editor in chief of RLC, Samira Gasimli.”

The user who was able to hack the account – Jn Alaza – has a Facebook profile and a list of 40+ friends some of whom appear to be fake. There is no further information available. The profile photo did not lead to any results when running a reverse image search.  

The news platform’s admins are trying to recover the deleted content but as previous experience has shown, Facebook has never (at least in the case of Azerbaijan) helped with content recovery.