Thirty-four Facebook pages, 25 Facebook groups, each one of them hundreds of members sharing pictures of women and children.
Though the Kerala Police has been making claims about targeting online perverts, there are many such groups on the social media platform.
Kerala Cyber Warriors, a group of self-proclaimed ethical hackers hacked into 34 Facebook pages and 25 groups which were posting explicit and/or pornographic content. Many of these pages featured regular or intimate photos of women and even children.
Some members on such groups were also posting revenge porn (in the form of pictures and videos) and details of their ex-girlfriends or spouses. All of them were in Malayalam.
The hackers’ Facebook page put up a post on Thursday, staking claim to the feat under the names “Op_Indian_Online_Prostitution” and “Op_Indian_Sex_Chatting”.
After hacking into the pages, Kerala Cyber Warriors updated these pages with a cover photo. This image bears a message saying that the page has been hacked and threatens to “hack and expose” the real face of people who are part of such communities.
What made us especially glad was that the hackers deleted all the content from each of these pages and groups.
The names of some of these pages were: 'Aniyathi Kalikal', 'Kutty Kalikal', 'Teen boys and girls special' and 'Feeling Box'.
Rohit Raj reported for Deccan Chronicle that according to the hackers, more than 10,000 such pages are active in Malayalam language alone and are growing despite being repeatedly shut down.
TNM spoke to a group member who chose to remain anonymous. This individual will be referred to as X.
X says that they were helped by their “supporters” who sent them links to these pages and groups. “All these pages were sharing pictures of girls with vulgar captions and other pornographic pictures. There was even a page which had shared a picture of a child who looked no older than seven,” points out X.
People were sharing pictures of their ex-girlfriends (many of them explicit in nature), pictures of girls in public places like bus stops and other photos downloaded from women’s social media accounts, without permission, X informs.
In one such example, the hackers’ Facebook page posted edited screenshots of one group member’s conversation with the admin of a Facebook page. This Facebook user sent nude photos of girls who he claimed were his ex-girlfriends, without blurring their faces. The admin can be seen asking for more pictures, following which the user sends another picture of an “old friend” downloaded from her Facebook account.
These groups and pages are hugely popular as well. X observes that each page had 3,000 members on average, while some even had 10,000.
Kerala Cyber Warriors had unleashed this war on pornographic content in January last year after a Facebook page called ‘Kochu Sundarikal’ made news for furthering a sex racket involving minor girls.
This is not the first mass hacking undertaken by Kerala Cyber Warriors. On Independence Day last year, the group had hacked into 50 Pakistani websites.
The message on each of these hacked websites read: “Take a stand against evil, corruption and terrorism, for we belong to India. A nation of pride and we will thus say, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, hum sab bhai bhai hain, Happy Independence Day.”
Soon after that, the hackers collective took over the website of Maneka Gandhi-backed People For Animals, demanding a stray dog free India.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)