Source: National Cyber Security – Produced By Gregory Evans
Facebook’s official Twitter and Instagram accounts are hijacked by hackers who cracked NFL and ESPN social media accounts last week
- The Twitter accounts of Facebook and Instagram were hacked by OurMine, the same group that made compromised NFL and ESPN posts a week earlier
- Before that, OurMine had laid dormant since 2017, when it went after social media accounts owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
- OurMine also previously targeted Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai, as well as HBO
The official Twitter and Instagram accounts of Facebook and its Messenger platform were hijacked Friday by the same hackers that targeted NFL teams and ESPN a week earlier.
OurMine identified itself in the unauthorized posts made under the Facebook accounts, which were deleted almost as fast as they went live.
‘Hi, we are O u r M i n e,’ the hackers wrote in several of the posts on the Twitter accounts that Facebook and Messenger maintain.
Users online watched in amusement as the hackers had their way with the social media giant in real time.
OurMine hacked its way into the Twitter and Instagram accounts maintained by Facebook and its Messenger platform on Friday
‘Hi, we are O u r M i n e,’ the hackers wrote in several of the posts on the Twitter and Instagram (pictured) accounts that Facebook and Messenger maintain
The official Instagram account of Facebook also was compromised
Users online watched in amusement as the hackers had their way with the social media giant in real time. The unauthorized posts were deleted almost as soon as they went live, noted Twitter user Jame Manchun Wong, who works on reverse-engineering apps
A Twitter spokesperson in an emailed statement confirmed the accounts were hacked by a third-party platform.
That platform appears credited in some of the posts as a service called Khoros, which OurMine presumably used.
The accounts were frozen and efforts were underway to restore them, the spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for Facebook did not immediately respond when DailyMail.com reached out.
Prior to last week’s hack, OurMine had laid dormant for about three years.
In 2017, the hackers had gone after social media accounts owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai, as well as HBO.
In another, similar hack, OurMine made sports fans do a double take when they hijacked the official Twitter accounts of NFL teams last week. In one post, the Chicago Bears appeared to have celebrated a new owner, Saudi Arabian royal family adviser Turki Al-Sheikh
A follow up tweet unofficially on behalf of the Chicago Bears claims the post was ‘Just Kidding’ and reveals OurMine was responsible for any confusion
The official Twitter account of the Buffalo Bills after it was hacked by OurMine
Professing ‘we’re back’, OurMine last week also hacked into the official Green Bay Packers Twitter account
This year’s Super Bowl contenders, the Kansas City Chiefs, also were hacked
The official Twitter account of the NFL also was hacked
OurMine took a similar approach hacking ESPN’s Twitter account
OurMine, described as a Saudi account that promotes its own cybersecurity services, said through a person claiming to be affiliated with the hackers, that its intentions are to ‘show people that everything is hackable.’
The three-years that passed since its last wave of digital mayhem was ‘due to some issues’, the person told NBC News, after the bogus NFL posts were made last week.
It was not clear how the hacks were carried out on the NFL teams, which included the Chicago Bears, Buffalo Bills, Green Bay Packers and this year’s Super Bowl contenders, the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs.
OurMine was able to access the 49ers account on Twitter, but it was locked before any unauthorized tweets were made.
‘We pick our targets randomly, and we already tried to contact them before the tweets but we didn’t receive any response yet,’ the hacker representative told NBC.
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