The Twitter account of another top executive was hacked recently. On Sunday, the OurMine hacking team seized the Twitter account of John Hanke, CEO of Pokémon Go developer Niantic. The hacker made posts through Hanke’s account requesting that Pokemon Go be released in Brazil. Further, the posts by the hacker directed users to check their account security.
OurMine claims it’s “For Brazil”
A series of tweets were posted on July 31 to Hanke’s 16,000 followers. The tweets were hashtagged “OurMine,” and the hacker team claimed that the hack was for Brazil.
“#OurMine | This hack for Brazil #POKEMONGOBRAZIL #PokemonGo4Brazil !?”one of the tweets read.
Brazil is one of the countries where the popular game Pokemon Go has not been rolled out yet. Replying to the hackers’ tweet, one Twitter user said, “The Brazilian community didn’t ask for this.”
Also the hacking team claimed that it was testing Hanke’s security, and it offered its services to upgrade his security. The upgrade would involve little more than choosing a better password and maybe turning on two-factor authentication, as the subsequent tweet claimed Hanke’s Twitter password was something very obvious and simple.
One of the tweets claimed that the password of Hanke was “nopass.” “His password was too easy “nopass” #OurMine !?” the tweet said. How the hacking team got access to Hanke’s password of is still not certain. The Quora links included in the tweets have been removed. The company has not commented on the matter yet.
OurMine: an expert in hacking Twitter accounts
Last month, the hacker team claimed to be behind outages on the Pokémon Go network, although the claim is not verified yet. It is possible that rather than being floored by a deliberate denial-of-service attack, Niantic’s servers were overwhelmed by high levels of demand from real people.
However, one must not forget that OurMine is quite good at taking over people’s Twitter accounts. Popular victims of OurMine include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, William Shatner, and Shuhei Yoshida. Other targets include WikiLeaks’ main website, technology website TechCrunch and HSBC’s servers.
Interestingly, OurMine claims to assess social network account security, so the hacks done by them appear like a marketing stunt that directs users to upgrade account security. The stunt, nevertheless, has gained plenty of reactions, including from people in Brazil who think that the hack is not a good way to get a point across.