Hacking

The OurMine group also hacked the Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s Quora account

The Saudi-based group of hackers known as OurMine has another illustrious victim, after Mark Zuckerberg they have also hacked the Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s Quora account.

OurMine is a hacking collective that is scaring IT giants, the list of victims is very long and include names like Mark ZuckerbergTwitter co-founder Evan Williams, David Guetta Daniel Ek, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, the CEO and founder of Spotify, and many others.

The last victim in order of time is the CEO of Google, Suchar Pichai, members of the OurMine group have hacked his Quora account that was also linked to his Twitter accounts. The hackers have been posting messages on through the Pichai’s Quora account and shared them also with all the 508,000 Twitter followers.

Twitter promptly removed the messages, but it is easy to find them online, below a picture shared by Techworm.net.

 

As already occurred for other victims, it is likely that OurMine hackers have used data coming from other data breaches, but the hacking crew claims that it have used the exploits in their arsenal in order to obtain the login credentials of its illustrious victims.

Which is the motivation?

It seems that the OurMine group is linked to a Security Firm that is trying to obtain notoriety from the attacks and is offering its services to the targets, that evidently need them to avoid further incidents.

One of the messages posted by the group states:

“We are just testing people security (sic), we never change their passwords, we did it because there is other hackers can hack them and change everything.”

The OurMine group explained that it gained access to Pichai’s account by exploiting a security issue in Quora’s platform, the team also explained that it reported the flaw to the company that ignored its warning.

Quora’s users are advised, I strongly suggest you to avoid sharing same login credentials among several web services.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Sundar Pichai, OurMine Team)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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