Kabarak University regains Facebook page after hack

Kabarak University announced on Tuesday it had regained access to its Facebook page after a hacker took it over during the weekend and started posting mischievous messages.

Vice-Chancellor Henry Kiplangat said the page had been recovered after joint efforts by the university's cyber security team and experts from Facebook’s parent company, Meta.

“[The team] worked tirelessly and deployed a wide range of cyber security measures to recover the taken-over Facebook account within the shortest time possible. The recovery process took sleepless nights and long days,” Prof Kiplangat said in a statement.

He noted the hack had “posed the imminent danger of loss of trust from the stakeholders and the general public,” adding that the institution had resolved to have cybersecurity training in collaboration with Meta.

On Sunday, the hacker posted on the page, which has a following of over 75,000 users, saying they were “just having fun” and that the college had to part with 500 dollars (about Ksh.68,000) to regain access to the page.

“I will not return this account, but I challenge all of you to reclaim this account immediately-regards a student from one of Jakarta's IT-based high schools," the post read in part.

By this time, they still had the Kabarak University name but had changed the page’s profile picture to a self-portrait photo of an Asian man.

Then on Tuesday, the page lit up the internet after photos of local politicians were shared, alongside cheeky captions.

Under a photo of Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, the hacker wrote: “Naibu rice”, making Kenyans debate whether the person behind the posts was actually from Indonesia, where Jakarta is located, or just another Kenyan.

As of Wednesday, Kabarak had restored the page’s profile picture to the official university logo and pulled down the hacker’s posts.