Facebook page of Balochistan Voices hacked and vandalized

 JournalismPakistan.com |  Published: 12 September 2017

The Facebook page of Balochistan Voices was hacked and vandalized by unidentified attackers. The team quickly regained control and restored access to the page.

Summary

QUETTA - The Facebook page of online newspaper Balochistan Voices was Tuesday hacked and vandalized by unidentified hackers.

Balochistan Voices was established in 2016. The paper operates out of Quetta and covers the province’s socio-economic issues.

The paper’s Facebook page has over 75,000 fans and it is the main source of traffic to its website.

Hackers deleted all posts on the page published in the past month and also changed the name of the page to English Voices. They also shared at least one link on the page which contained obscene material. The hackers also made the page invisible to Facebook users in Pakistan.

The web team of Balochistan Voices managed to regain control of the page within an hour and started restoring it. They were able to make it accessible to users in Pakistan again and also restored its cover and profile picture. However, the name of the page could not be changed for one week due to Facebook policies.

Recently, Balochistan Voices published a rebuttal to interview of Dr. Kasier Bengali on CPEC and also highlighted the inaccuracies in a Dawn newspaper story about the census in Balochistan.

Team Balochistan Voices in its Facebook post vowed that such hacking attempts cannot deter them from doing their job.