OurMine hackers used data from the LinkedIn breach

Jun 5, 2016 23:40 GMT  ·  By

OurMine, a small team of hackers from Saudi Arabia, managed to take over Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter and Pinterest accounts tonight, even if for a few hours.

Before Twitter took down their official account, the hackers tweeted that they found Zuckerberg's account details in the recent LinkedIn data breach.

The hackers then broke Zuckerberg's SHA1-hashed password string, took his password and tried it on several social media accounts.

The group was successful in breaking into Zuckerberg's Twitter and Pinterest profile, defacing its banners with their logo, and even tweeting out some offensive messages.

Defacements have been removed

Twitter was the first to react, taking down Zuckerberg's profile, deleting the tweet, and then suspending the hackers' account in the end.

Pinterest's crew took some hours before cleaning Zuckerberg's profile, but not before social media was filled with screenshots of his hacked account.

In tweets now unavailable, the hackers also bragged about hacking Zuckerberg's Instagram account, but nobody was able to verify their claim.

The hackers tweeted that Zuckerberg's LinkedIn password was "dadada," also used for his other accounts. Users should take this opportunity and set different passwords on their social media accounts.

Who is OurMine?

Akamai ran a profile on OurMine in July 2015, when the company saw the group expand from hacking social media accounts to launching several DDoS attacks on financial institutions.

The group also made headlines in January 2016, when they hacked and stole 200,000 user credentials from the DayZ community forum.

Akamai believes OurMine members are based in Saudi Arabia. Several sources have approached your reporter with information to expose the OurMine team's real identity, in a process called doxing. Those sources also confirmed Akamai's findings and revealed the group is made up of Saudi teenagers. The group's membership varied across time from four to six members.

Screenshots of Zuckerberg's hacked accounts
Screenshots of Zuckerberg's hacked accounts

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OurMine hacks Zuckerberg's Twitter and Pinterest accounts
Screenshots of Zuckerberg's hacked accounts
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