News

OurMine Hacks Variety Website; Sends Fake Emails to Readers

OurMine hacking group known for hacking social media accounts of tech giants and their CEOs has found a new target and this time it’s the official website of Variety news, a weekly American entertainment news magazine.

Earlier Saturday morning, OurMine group hacked into the Variety news website and posted an article with a title,

“Review: Hacked by #OutMine -Read The post!! [Important] By Sasan Crabtree.”

Sasan Crabtree was a writer for Variety whose last article was published in 2004 and it seems like the group hacked her contributor account to post the above-mentioned title and below mentioned content inside the article.

“Hello Variety, it’s #OurMine, don’t worry we are just testing your security, please contact us on ourmine.org -> Contact to show you how…” it stopped mid-sentence, instructing to “watch a video” link for further instruction. That video has since been taken down.

Image Source: Juice Black / Twitter

That’s not all, the hackers also sent fake emails to Variety’s subscribers but it is unclear how they got access to the subscribers’ list.

Image Source: Derrick

Variety, on the other hand, has acknowledged the hack and issued an apology on their site:

“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.”

 Who’s OurMine?

OurMine is the same group who has been hacking social media accounts of high-profile tech celebrities by using old passwords from LinkedIn and MySpace data dumps. In the past couple of months, OurMine took over accounts of Pokémon Go’s creator John HankeGoogle’s CEO Sundar PichaiTwitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s CEO Mark ZuckerbergZach Kleinco-founder of video-sharing website Vimeo, Twitter account of WikiPedia founder Jimmy Wales and Vine account of Amanda Cerny.

[fullsquaread][/fullsquaread]

This is not the first time when hackers have sent fake notifications to a site’s subscribers. In 2012, Syrian Electronic Army hacked Al Jazeera’s breaking news mobile service and sent false news alerts to its subscribers about an assassination attack on Qatari Prime Minister.

To Top

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This