VietNamNet Bridge - A lot of people well known on Facebook have been unexpectedly renamed ‘Vu Dinh Dung’ in recent days. This mostly happened with personal Facebook fanpages with hundreds of thousands of viewers.

 

A lot of people well known on Facebook have been unexpectedly renamed ‘Vu Dinh Dung’ in recent days.

The phenomenon was discovered by netizens on February 14, 2016. A lot of famous Facebookers saw their accounts renamed into ‘Vu Dinh Dung’, expressing their worries about this.

The majority of victims discovered their problem one day later.

An analyst commented that he could not imagine this would happen as Facebook is strict with accounts which do not use their real names. It has been difficult to change Facebook account names.

Users nowadays have to log in to their accounts and then request to change names on the social network. How can people access victims’ accounts on social network when many users set 2-layer passwords to protect their Facebook?

It’s possible to change names without hacking accounts

The Facebookers who saw their account names changed have been told to report their problems to Facebook Vietnam to get support.

In late 2014, many Facebookers complained that their Facebook accounts were blocked just because they did not declare their real names. To re-open their accounts, users were required to show at least one document with photos to confirm identity and then change names on Facebook.

Many required procedures are handled automatically, including the personal information confirmation. Therefore, analysts noted, the measures to protect accounts are sometimes ignored.

Facebook now applies a policy which allows users in the countries which do not use Latin letters (South Korea, Saudi Arabia etc) to change users’ names. Therefore, evildoers may have sent the requests to change names to Facebook, declaring that they were from the countries.

The violators need to find victims’ log-in email accounts. This can be easily implemented through connection between Facebook accounts and other services.

When Facebook connects with Yahoo, for example, they will find on Yahoo’s list the names of the senders and their Facebook’s accounts. After that, they will need to create counterfeited accesses from the countries like South Korea with some utilities available on Chrome browser.

Facebook, the largest social network, still has not had any replies on the phenomenon. However, some experts said this could not be seen as a Facebook’s security vulnerability. Meanwhile, victims should blame themselves in this case, as they accidentally revealed social media log-in emails.

The experts said that users now can avoid this by changing email addresses. This will allow Facebookers to prevent their accounts from name changing, but also protect from other risks.

The Facebookers who saw their account names changed have been told to report their problems to Facebook Vietnam to get support.

Facebook’s account of Son Tung MTP, a famous singer, has seen its name changed into ‘Dao Dan Le’.


Thanh Mai