In what could possibly be, one of the most serious hacks undertaken by the notorious three-person group that ‘OurMine‘, tech media platform TechCrunch’s social media accounts and website were hacked. Why serious you ask ? Well, imagine news outlets under the control of a hacker. Yep, exactly.
This is just a very recent development and has been confirmed by the hacker group themselves, in a blogpost posted on their website. The hacker group, however, has deviated from its usual practice that it has been following recently, where it would post hours earlier whose account or website they were gonna attack as a warning.
OurMine didn’t do such a thing this time around, and just attacked the TechCrunch servers to attain control to the same. Most international publications, including TechCrunch had recently shifted to 256-bit encrypted secure https:// protocol to avoid such an attack. That clearly hasn’t helped, at least in this case.
In its usual manner,OurMine had posted the same message that they post on each individual’s social account that they hack,
We’re just out your security. Contact us to gain access to your account(or website in this case)
It also seems that OurMine was able to use TechCrunch’s back-end WordPress service to write an article post and publish it to the website. It, however, redirected to an error page. It was also able to gain access to the publications Facebook page from the back-end service and publish their message(or agenda) — whichever you wanna call it.
According to Matt Navarra’s tweet, it seems OurMine first gained access to TechCrunch’s Twitter account. But the tweet has since then been deleted.
TechCrunch site + Twitter account just got hacked.
Link to post: https://t.co/Sq0KZee6L4 pic.twitter.com/ep4iprG4Jg
— Matt Navarra ⭐️ (@MattNavarra) July 26, 2016
It seems that someone from TechCrunch has contacted the hackers and have regained control of their website. There is however no certainty about how the hacker group was able to gain access to TechCrunch’s website. We’re waiting for an official word on the same from the publication.
OurMine Hacker Group
If you’ve been active on the interwebs and haven’t heard of theOurMine Group, then what are you spending your time on the Internet. OneMine is the most-active and known hacker group that taken over and vandalized the social media accounts of over a couple dozen celebrities and founders. This includes the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Travis Kalanick, Katy Perry, Drake and many others.
The hacker group recently has also claimed to have hacked into the servers of the most-recent global phenomenon — Pokemon Go — and jammed them on the weekend. It then also took care of the second hacker group ‘PoodleCorp’ that tried to steal its thunder in the Pokemon Go server attacks.
OurMine has recently pitched itself as a mesiah of cyber-security, who is giving people a look as to how insecure their data on the Internet is. The trio of hacker also adds that the group is now pivoting and positioning itself as a security agency, who wants to charge the people it hacks to ensure their security.
