Google chief Sundar Pichai’s Quora account hacked
28 Jun 2016
Google CEO Sundar Pichai who had his Quora account hacked last night, has become the latest victim of ''Our Mine'', a group that targets the social media accounts of top tech personalities. The hack comes less than a month after both Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify boss Daniel Ek suffered a similar fate.
The breach of Pichai's account became known when tweets linking to Pichai's Quora posts - referencing the OurMine group - appeared on his official Twitter account late Sunday night. Unlike the case of Daniel Ek, however, the hackers failed to gain access to Pichai's Twitter account proper, rather relying on Quora's auto-tweet functionality to notify his half-a-million followers about the breach.
The mysterious OurMine group's methods seemed to be different from recent high-profile hacks. Instead of simply defacing a target's social media presence, the collective behind OurMine said it was "testing security," advising the target to get in contact to "upgrade it."
The group's services are also available to ordinary folk who can also pay for the group's services, which charges $5,000 for a "scan" of social media accounts, site security holes, and other vulnerabilities.
"We are just testing your security,'' the hackers wrote, and the same message was auto-posted via Quora to Pichai's Twitter account. The posts had been deleted on Monday.
The hacks had been fairly innocuous so far, with no major repercussions or sensitive data stolen, but there is speculation in social media circles as to who would be next.
OurMine said via email that it would continue to hack the accounts of tech executives and celebrities and it claimed last week to have taken over the Twitter accounts of movie star Channing Tatum and of Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify, and posted screenshots.
On Monday, the group targeted the Twitter account of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who said in a tweet, that it was actually his Bitly account that had been compromised.