Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai is the latest public figure to have his online accounts hijacked by OurMine.
Yesterday morning, a tweet was sent from Mr. Pichai’s account with the message: “Hey, it’s OurMine,we are just testing your security, to upgrade your security please visit our website”. A similar message was also posted to his Quora account.
OurMine’s motivation appears to be to sell their service, which carries out so-called personal and enterprise security checks.
In a statement to The Next Web, they said: “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.”
Google’s Mr. Pichai is not the first high-profile figure in tech to be 'attacked' in this way.
Earlier this month, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has his Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest accounts accessed by the same group, followed by former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.
It’s not yet clear how the group gained access, however OurMine claim that they got into Mr. Pichai’s account through a vulnerability in Quora.
A similar link to Bitly has been reported, which it has denied. Instead, it has stated that the issue is password reuse - as was the case with Mr. Zuckerberg whose password was the same for all three compromised accounts.
Regardless of the cause of this breach, individuals can help to protect themselves by using different passwords for different accounts, enabling two-factor verification and being mindful which websites they integrate with their social media accounts.
