Chief Minister Raut's Facebook page hacked, yet to be recovered

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Janakpurdham, 6 December (2020) - The official Facebook page of Province-2 Chief Minister Lalbabu Raut has been hacked for the last two days. It is yet to be recovered.

CM's secretariat has said that the reason and purpose behind the hack is still not clear.

Two Facebook pages, CM Lalbabu Raut and CM Communications Secretariat, were hacked Friday morning. Raut's press coordinator Aatish Mishra has been looking after the pages.

"I came to know about the hack only two minutes after it happened on Friday," Mishra told Lokantar. "We immediately informed Nepal Police's Cyber Bureau in Kathmandu about it."

The profile picture of the Facebook page features a foreign woman. Mishra said that the hacker's location keeps changing.

"Cyber Bureau has told us that it takes at least seven days to recover the page," Mishra said. "The page may or may not be recovered."

He said that privacy won't be breached because no private chat had been made from the pages. All the posts are public and nothing is private, he said.

Those pages used to post congratulation messages, different press releases and CM's speeches in various programs.

"More than 30,000 people had been following CM Lalbabu Raut page," Mishra said. "The hacker must have hacked the page for commercial purposes."

He said that Facebook will be requested to shut the pages if they can't be recovered.

DIG Dhiraj Pratap Singh, who also is the Province-2 police chief, said that the hacking of CM's official page is a serious matter. "His privacy may be breached, objectionable posts to assassinate his character may be made and important documents may be misused," he said. "The Cyber Bureau has been investigating into the issue. The guilty may get up to three years of imprisonment."

Nepal Police Cyber Bureau Inspector Wakil Singh said that the bureau has already sent a letter to Facebook requesting to provide details about the hacker.

"We have a sent a request letter to Facebook in the US. Details about the hacker will be available only after Facebook sends a response," Singh said. "It is taking time to process data."