There is a new group of hackers in town. After acquiring the Twitter login credentials of Mark Zuckerberg the new group of hackers known as ‘OurMine’ has managed to gain access to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai.
Everyone started to talk about them at the beginning of this month. The collective of hackers known as OurMine has been pursuing high profile targets. The list of successful attacks is growing, the hackers even managed to steal the login information of Twitter’s ex-CEO Dick Costolo. Who are they?
It’s obviously hard to track a group of people that uses the internet to commit crimes. Services like Proxy tunnels, Virtual Private Networks, and Virtual Private Servers enables people to mask their identities and minimize their online presence. OurMine has used several IP addresses from Saudi Arabia, and the hackers have been actively trying to gain notoriety and fame since the beginning of this year.
Although the group has an official website where they claim to offer security auditing services, a few inconsistencies about the hackers true nature remains. Recall that White-Hat hackers are the ones who work side by side with companies or individuals to aid them in the task of achieving the ‘Security of Operations’. Hackers in this spectrum like to find bugs and collect legitimate bounties on their discoveries. However, OurMine doesn’t fall entirely in this category.
Crackers (or black-hat hackers) like to benefit one way or another from the malicious attacks they perform. OurMine has shown that they belong in this category. The group has performed attacks on Minecraft game servers and public organizations like WikiLeaks. Apparently, the first public mention of the collective was back in July of 2015, when they allegedly carried out a Denial of Service Attack against several financial institutions.
The group gained some notoriety when they performed another DDoS attack, this time against WikiLeaks, this led to some criticisms, especially from the ‘hacker community’. The timing of this attack was bad, Anonymous was collaborating with WikiLeaks in an operation about Cyber Espionage in the United States.
Attacking YouTubers Channel is another of the activities attributed to OurMine, Markiplier, a YouTuber gamer with more than 14 million subscribers saw how his channel got hijacked by the crackers. This attack was replayed on to other Youtube Channels.
The group started to target famous people to gain further popularity and notoriety:
As always, we encourage our readers to exert caution. Basic security measures like never reusing passwords across websites, never installing suspicious software on your computer, and to keep large stashes of cryptocurrencies on secure cold wallets.
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