In the last couple of weeks, an anonymous group of hackers calling themselves as OurMine are hacking social media accounts of global celebrities. The latest in the list is Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai.
On Sunday night Sundar Pichai’s twitter and Quora accounts were hacked. Pichai’s account had a tweet “Hey, it’s OurMine, we are just testing your security, to upgrade your security please visit our website.” The tweet was removed in few minutes, but the cyber security sector was stunned because it is not the first major hack from OurMine. Facebook CEO
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, his sister Randi Zuckerberg, Spotify founder Daniel Ek, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and actor Channing Tatum are the other personalities on the victim list of OurMine. All their accounts had messages similar to that in Sundar Pichai’s account.
OurMine is projecting themselves as a different hacking group. On their website, they portray themselves as a “Security Group” that offers personal and enterprise security checks, with a PayPal price of $1000 for website scan and $5000 for full company audit. They are making advertisements not by posters but by hacking!
An anonymous member of OurMine has described that it is a three member team. He said “We are not black hat hackers; we are just a security group. We are just trying to tell the people that nobody is safe.”
The group also claims that it is generous. It says that OurMine has not changed the passwords of any of the accounts it hacked. The anonymous person also revealed that they keep changing their IP every minute so that they always stay ahead of the law enforcement.
Among the accounts hacked, one thing was found to be in common. It was the usage of ‘Bitly’, a URL shortening service. The anonymous man claimed that OurMine used the vulnerability in the Bitly accounts to enter the twitter accounts of Randi and Vogels. But Bitly denied any such vulnerability in their services.
The member who was accessed did not speak fluent English according to the wired.com, which got access to the man. Few experts doubt that these people could be the same group from Saudi Arabia that made attempts to hack Wiki leaks last December. But as of now, no one is able to anchor their identity correctly.
Many people shifted to Gmail, after they found it was efficient in terms of security and services. Messenger and WhatsApp provided end to end encryption and assured the users that their data is always safe. But now the accounts of the people who provided the security itself are unsafe.
Cyber crime is rising at a fast rate. People now have to find new and efficient ways to secure their data which we hope will happen soon.
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