What is OurMine and why should tech bosses be concerned?
What do Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai have in common? They’ve all been victims of OurMine, which over recent weeks has gone on a hacking spree on Twitter.
OurMine
The hacking group, which appears to be targeting high profile tech names, including the former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, this week took control of Kalanick’s account via Quora, and posted the following tweet: “You have been hacked by OurMine Team visit our website to secure yourself ourmine.org?”. The Tweet has since been deleted.
OurMine this week told Buzzfeed that it has not yet picked a new target and that it can take anywhere between an hour and several days to carry out a hack.
The group’s Facebook page last month appeared to threaten Bill Gates of an imminent hack after posting that it had access to “some” of his accounts.
OurMine has been active since the beginning of June when the group targeted the Twitter and Pinterest accounts of Zuckerberg and revealed his password, which was reportedly found in a database of user data stolen from Linkedin in 2011.
Rather than directly accessing accounts, OurMine is using apps such as Bitly and Quora to gain access. It also bills itself as a ‘Security Group’ and offers personal and enterprise security checks.
One hacker recently told Wired: “We don’t need money, but we are selling security services because there is a lot [of] people [who] want to check their security…We are not blackhat hackers, we are just a security group…we are just trying to tell people that nobody is safe.”
The attacks will no doubt raise alarm bells for other high-profile social media users, that have such accounts linked to their social media.