On Sunday, Jan. 26, there was a massive hackathon on the people of the NFL. Social media feeds of the NFL, as well as some teams, were under attack by a hacking group calling themselves OurMine.
The group posted in the social media accounts of multiple NFL players, "Everything is hackable." The group has been mainly quiet on their affairs up until their recent hit on NFL. Official social media pages of the Chicago Bears, Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, and Philadelphia Eagles, have all been temporarily taken over for a short period.
More social media account of NFL teams have been hacked on Monday, Jan. 27, including the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs, who will be facing each other in the Super Bowl this Feb. 2. All in all, 15 teams in total were hit - 14 of them had their Twitter accounts hacked, several of the players' Instagram and Facebook accounts were targeted as well.
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You may be wondering why OurMine would do this, is it something that they routinely do just for fun? Something more sinister? The answer to this is relatively easy. You can consider them as a gray-hat hacker group. Gray hats are usually operating in the middle of the spectrum when it comes to the hacking scene.
The reason for this is they carry out massive attacks to see and expose the security weaknesses of various social media services and offers their services to help keep those systems secure from more nefarious organizations.
Many of the messages posted on the accounts that were hacked were more about promoting their business services. Also, the group has swapped out some of the teams' pictures, headers, and whatever they could think of according to a BBC report.
Some sources claiming to be part of OurMine told BBC that the group had contacted the NFL prior to the breach offering to improve the teams' security online overall. However, they did not hear anything back, so it's safe to assume that was the consequence.
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The group OurMine, which currently is based in Dubai, has claimed responsibility for similar hacks done in the past since its formation in 2014. Back in 2016, they targeted social media accounts of the big shots in the tech industry. Examples of these targets are Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Facebook of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, lastly Jack Dorsey of Twitter.
Let this incident be a reminder again about the importance of keeping the privacy-not all things should be shared online.
OurMine also stated, "Everything is hackable," what damage could it do to you and yours if some pertinent information got out, and it would be used as blackmail, ransom, and what other means people can extort things from other. Be diligent, and make sure always to be up aware of what you post and save online.
