On October 7 evening, “confession” fanpages of several Vietnamese universities such as the Industry University of Ho Chi Minh City (IUH), Nguyen Tat Thanh University (NTTU), University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City (UEH) were suddenly renamed 'Dao Xuan Truong'. However, only the names of these fanpages were changed.

The next morning, the name of other fanpages were also changed to 'Dao Xuan Truong'. Some administrators had to stop posting articles and asked students not to make comments about attacked fanpages so as to not incite hackers.

This incident also affected people whose name is Dao Xuan Truong. A Facebook expert with more than 240,000 followers said that he was constantly called out on October 7 night because his nickname is Dao Xuan Truong and he provides services of verifying green ticks, preventing fanpage ads...

"Hackers have taken advantage of the vulnerability to send contacts to Facebook to change the name of the fanpages, without admin rights," said cybersecurity expert Thanh Dat from HCM City.

By exploiting this vulnerability, according to another IT expert named Nguyen Khoi, anyone can change the name of fanpages. However, this vulnerability was patched by Facebook on October 8 and it is no longer possible to change the name of fanpages.

By late October 8, some “confession” fanpages of Vietnamese universities were still named “Dao Xuan Truong” because the process to change their name back takes longer than usual. It is expected that within the next few days, the fan pages will be able to change their names to the old ones.

Phuong Nguyen

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