Linkin Park's Facebook page suffers hack attack

The official Facebook page of rock band Linkin Park has been hacked, and its 62 million fans bombarded with spam messages containing coarse images and out-of-character links to third-party sites.

As Hackread reports, at one point the hackers even hijacked Linkin Park’s social media platform to promote a new album by Jay Z.

To be honest, this doesn’t appear to be the most malicious attack ever undertaken against a Facebook account.

Although someone appears to have committed a crime by accessing Linkin Park’s Facebook account without authorisation, it would have been much more worrying if the links had been deliberately crafted to appear as though they really did come from the band, and had directed fans to webpages that had attempted to infect their computers with malware or phish their login details.

For instance, it’s easy to imagine how an announcement of a free concert or a link to a previously-unreleased track could have sent millions of Linkin Park fans towards a boobytrapped webpage designed to plant malware onto their PCs.

But, lets not doubt for a second, that there is harm done by hacks like this.

Any rock group as big as Linkin Park has become a corporate machine, with teams of marketing people helping promote the band’s brand online and publicising new releases and tours.

A vital part of that promotion is done these days via social networking sites like Facebook, and when a fan page gets hacked and starts sending out irritating messages, your fans are sure to scurry away.

Wakey wakey LP it guy(s). Your Facebook has been hacked. Unless of course you planned to spam us with pointless ad click pages to set up for a song on the new album…

As some fans commented, the hack was resulting in Linkin Park losing thousands of Facebook fans as they un-Liked the page to spare themselves from the spammers’ messages.

The likes are dropping like hell – it was 62,630,xxx before and now it is 62,600,xxx, about 200 likes per second.. why are the fans not getting that the pages was hacked??

Please like back again…..

At the time of writing, Linkin Park’s Facebook page appears to have removed the offending messages, and normal service may have been restored.

Nevertheless, I hope that the page’s admins will look closely at what occurred – and ask themselves whether safer password practices and two-factor authentication might have better kept the reins to Linkin Park’s Facebook page out of the hands of the hackers.

All organisation with a Facebook presence need to take proper care of their page’s security, or risk having it hacked and defaced by attackers. Poorly protected Facebook pages get hacked every day – and if it happens to your company you have to hope that it is a mischief-maker rather than someone with malice in their heart.