Facebook’s Twitter Accounts Hacked by OurMine [ An Hacking Group Behind the WikiLeaks and Many Other Hacks ]

It was initially considered a joke, when news reached us that Facebook’s Twitter accounts have been hacked. But after looking into it, we have not only come to learn this claim to be true, we have also learnt that the hack was carried out by an hacking group known as OurMine.

This recent attack against the social media giant, is stated to have taken place on Friday, February 7, 2020. The hacking group broke into Facebook’s Twitter account, then twitted:

Hi, we are OurMine.

Well, even Facebook is hackable but at least their security better than Twitter.

To improve your accounts security

Contact us: contact@ourmine.org

While Twitter has been able to handle back ownership of the hacked account to Facebook, this recent hack from the hacking group has generated a lot of interesting discussions. In fact, it was also learnt the group was able to pull off a hack on Facebook’s Instagram account as well. In other words, this is not just about Twitter’s security being poor, it also seem this applies to many other technology giants.

But who is/are the people behind OurMine? And what are they about?

OurMine

OurMine, as the group itself claims, is a group of white-hat hackers with the aim of improving the cyber security of entities. This definition of the group can easily be found on the group’s official website, although Anonymous has accused them of being a black-hat group.

According to details gathered from the official website of OurMine, they can help scan if a person’s social accounts are vulnerable to hacks, among other things.

While this might be the first time for many people, hearing about OurMine, the group has been around for about 4 years. And not only has it been around for this long, it has also been involved in a bunch of other serious hacks, with one of them being an hack against WikiLeaks.

Who is/are behind OurMine?

It is quite unknown who exactly are the people behind OurMine. However, people lay claim to the fact that this group is a Saudi Arabian-based hacking group. In fact, a young man has been connected as one of the members of the group, although he denied it, and no evidence has been found against his denial.

However, regardless of who are behind this group, one thing is quite clear: the people behind this group seem to come from a non-English speaking country, as grammatical mistakes have frequently been spotted in their public statements.

However, it doesn’t seem to be totally impossible to hunt this group down, as they have got a PayPal account, with which they receive payments. In other words, PayPal should be able to provide some information about the group, if there is ever a need for it.

What other hacks have they carried out?

There are a countless number of hacks OurMine has been involved in. And hardly is there any of these hack which does not involve a prominent entity.

In 2016, the group carried out a series of hacks, one of which is an hack on the Twitter account of Jimmy Wales, a co-founder of Wikipedia. The Twitter account of a popular game creator, John Hake, was also hacked in that same 2016.

And the whole thing started to get even more interesting, when the group started targeting the Twitter accounts of founders and CEOs of prominent tech giants. The account of Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, was hacked, and this was followed by a hack on the Twitter account of Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai. Even the popular Facebook icon, Mark Zuckerberg, was not an exemption.

Companies like Netflix, Marvel, Sony, National Geographic, and TechCrunch, have also been victims of this hacking group, in one way or the other.

But despite how much fame the group was able to gather in 2016, the group did not seem to be satisfied with their popularity, as they went on another hacking spree, in 2017. In 2017, the following entities became victims of OurMine, in one way or the other: David Guetta, the New York Times, the WWE, Game of Thrones, PlayStation, Barcelona Football Club, Vevo, and Real Madrid.

After these hacks which took place in 2017, there ceased to be more hacks from the group, although it is quite difficult to say if OurMine decided to relax or social media companies were able to improve their security. But anyway, the hacking group has now surfaced once again, and we don’t know how far they’d be going this time around.