The hacking group OurMine is at it again, and this time the victim is none other than Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google.
The hackers broke into Pichai's Quora account and posted several messages via the social media site. Since Pichai's Quora account is linked to his Twitter account, OurMine was easily able to broadcast its feat to all of Pichai's 508,000 followes.
The team announced its achievement on its website on Monday, June 27.
"Today, we checked Sundar Pichai Security, and we got access to his twitter & Quora accounts, his security was really weak," noted OurMine.
OurMine is a three-person hacker outfit and seems to have a thing for CEOs. Earlier in June, as we reported, Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Pinterest and Twitter accounts were also hacked by OurMine. The hackers posted to Zuckerberg's Twitter account, which had been inactive since 2012. Twitter was quick to respond and swiftly suspended his account temporarily.
OurMine also seems to favor tech elites as on Thursday, June 23, the hacking outfit broke into yet another social media account - the Twitter account of Spotify CEO Daniel Ek.
The team has also previously hacked into the social media accounts of high-profile people such as David Guetta, PewDiePie, ex-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Channing Tatum, to name a few. Even Twitter's co-founder Evan Williams' Twitter account was not safe and was compromised in June with OurMine claiming responsibility for the same.
The hackers revealed that they gained access to Pichai's account on Quora thanks to a vulnerability that exists in the Q&A site's platform. The hacking team also shared that it has notified Quora of this susceptibility, but is yet to get a response from them.
The tweets posted by OurMine to Pichai's account have now been deleted, but a screenshot of the same was posted on OurMine's site.
While it is not clear how OurMine gains access into the accounts of prominent personalities, it is likely that it does not breach the system. OurMine claims that it deploys different kinds of exploits to pull the passwords from the browsers of celebrities.
The hacking outfit is looking to rebrand itself to be a "security firm" and revealed to The Next Web that it was merely conducting tests.
"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," noted OurMine.
While this methodology may not be the best to garner the trust of prospective customers, OurMine seems optimistic of the path.
Pichai's Quora and Twitter accounts seem to have gone back to normal at the time of writing.
