OurMine, a hacking collective infamous for its propensity for taking over social media accounts of prominent personalities such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s Twitter accounts has now compromised major entertainment news website OurMine.
Self-proclaimed hacking group OurMine briefly took over Variety’s website, hijacking it over the weekend. The group proceed to publish a post of its own, stating that it was merely testing its target’s cybersecurity framework.
“Hacked by OurMine” the headline of the post read after it turned up on Variety before it was taken down shortly thereafter. “Hello Variety, it’s #OurMine, don’t worry we are just testing your security,” the post added.
The mischief didn’t stop there, however. The hackers went beyond compromising the website’s publishing base, by infiltrating its newsletter database. From here, OurMine reportedly sent a number of emails as spam to subscriber email addresses.
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Variety has since taken down the post by OurMine and began an internal investigation to look into the incident. The company raised the possibility of the compromise of a password belonging to an employee who had access to Variety’s content management system. The publication also insisted that none of Variety’s subscriber information was accessed.
In a post of its own that Variety stated:
The content management system for Variety was hacked Saturday by a group known as OurMine, which has attacked a growing number of companies and prominent figures in recent months. The entertainment-news website was infiltrated at approximately 9 A.M PT. OurMine sent messages to subscribers via multiple Variety e-mail newsletters.
It has to be noted that this incident, much like other OurMine hacks, aren’t results of server exploits or vulnerabilities but simply due to the group’s knack for effective social engineering to acquire passwords.
The publication also published an apology to its readers. It read:
You may have received one or more emails from Variety with the subject line #Ourmine. Variety did not send those emails; please ignore and delete them. We are working diligently to contain the matter and will update you when the issues have been resolved.
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