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Hacker group strikes at Google CEO Sundar Pichai
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has joined the list of high-profile Silicon Valley entrepreneurs whose social media accounts have been compromised by infamous hacking group OurMine Team.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Stanford, California, Friday, June 24. (AP/Jeff Chiu)
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oogle CEO Sundar Pichai has joined the list of high-profile Silicon Valley entrepreneurs whose social media accounts have been compromised by infamous hacking group OurMine Team. After breaking into and posting on his Quora account, the hacker group disseminated the same messages via Pichai’s Twitter through use of the auto-tweet feature. On Monday, the hack was spotted by The Next Web, who obtained a screenshot prior to the tweets being deleted.
Pichai’s feed was marked by OurMine’s trademark signature: “#OurMine We’re just testing your security.”
OurMine told The Next Web that it was only conducting a test: “We are just testing people security (sic), we never change their passwords, we did it because there is other hackers (sic) can hack them and change everything.”
(Read also: Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg loses control of social media)
The three-person hacker group noted that it was able to break into Pichai’s account by exploiting Quora’s platform vulnerability, additionally claiming to have brought the issue to the company’s attention but being met with no response.
However, in a statement to The Next Web, Quora denied such claims: “We are confident that Sundar Pichai’s account was not accessed via a vulnerability in Quora’s system. This is consistent with past reports where OurMine exploited a previous password leak on other services to gain access to accounts on Twitter or Facebook. We also have no record of a report by OurMine pointing to a vulnerability. […] Safeguarding our users is very important to us, which makes security at Quora one of our highest priorities.”
(Read also: Zuckerberg hacking serves as reminder to change passwords)
Previously, the hacker group claimed credit for having broken into Twitter accounts of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon vice President Werner Volgels, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek as well as other social media stars.
OurMine told mic.com that it has rebranded itself as a “security group,” only hacking people in the hope of promoting security and its services, leaving a benign public message encouraging people to “upgrade” or ask it for help. The group reportedly changes their IP addresses “every minute” in order to stay steps ahead of authorities. (sab/kes)
