Hackers accuse BuzzFeed of publishing "fake news"

Oct 5, 2016 14:45 GMT  ·  By

Saudi hacking group OurMine has hacked BuzzFeed and defaced some articles, including a story in which the publication had supposedly revealed the real identity of one of the crew's members.

The article, cached here and here, claims that a Saudi teenager named "Ahmad Makki" is the main person behind the OurMine group. BuzzFeed said that its report was based on the fact that this name continuously came up in doxes published online by various other hacking groups, but also cited new evidence its reporters received.

A day after the article's publication, a number of BuzzFeed articles were defaced (cached version here) with the following message:

  Hacked by OurMine team, don’t share fake news about us again, we have your database. Next time it will be public. Don’t [expletive] with OurMine again.  

It is unclear if OurMine managed to steal BuzzFeed's database. At the time of writing, all defaced BuzzFeed articles are down, along with the original exposé. BuzzFeed provided the following comment regarding the incident via Twitter:

  The hacking group OurMine Wednesday altered several posts on BuzzFeed.com after a BuzzFeed News article reported that a Saudi teenager is most likely behind scores of hacks of tech CEOs and celebrities. BuzzFeed News is working to restore the altered articles, including the original report on the group.  

OurMine - the group that hacked celebrities and high-profile CEOs

OurMine has built a reputation among hacking outfits after hacking many celebrities such as Deadmau5, David Guetta, Channing Tatum, Lana Del Rey, Drake, Pewdiepie, Alexa Losey, and Kylie Jenner.

The list of hacked tech CEOs and Silicon Valley executives includes many famous names:

  • Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO, they hacked his Pinterest and Twitter profile);
  • Dick Costolo (former Twitter CEO, they hacked his Pinterest account and cross-posted to his Twitter account);
  • Jack Dorsey (Twitter CEO, they hacked his Vine account and cross-posted to his Twitter account);
  • Sundar Pichai (Google CEO, they hacked his Quora account and cross-posted to his Twitter profile);
  • John Hanke (Niantic CEO, they hacked his Quora account and cross-posted to his Twitter profile);
  • Zach Klein (Vimeo CEO, they hacked his Quora account and cross-posted to his Twitter profile);
  • Ev Williams (Twitter, Blogger, and Medium co-founder, they hacked his Twitter account);
  • Marissa Mayer (Yahoo CEO, they hacked her Twitter account);
  • Jimmy Wales (former Wikipedia CEO, they hacked his Twitter account);
  • Daniel Ek (Spotify CEO, they hacked his Twitter account);
  • Brendan Iribe (Oculus Rift CEO, they hacked his Twitter account);
  • Adam Mosseri (Facebook VP, they hacked his Twitter account).
Additionally, the group also hacked other news publications such as TechCrunch and Variety.

Group had been doxed by other hacking crews, but data is "questionable"

Other hacking groups despise OurMine for their silly social engineering antics, and that's why many have tried to reveal the group members' real identities in a tactic known as "doxing."

These groups attempted to dox OurMine several times before, and there are currently sixteen different OurMine doxes just on PasteBin. Most of these files contain different information about the OurMine group members and should be considered wildly inaccurate.

Today, OurMine took responsibility for the BuzzFeed hack, and issued the following message [original text, no corrections]:

  Why we hacked it? Alright, yesterday Buzzfeed Created a post that we are only 1 member called Ahmed Makki, and we can confirm that we don’t Have a member called ” Ahmed Makki ” and we are now 4 we were 3 but someone joined, and we hacked it because they are reporting fake news about us