Google CEO Sundar Pichai isn’t going to have a happy start to his week. The CEO of Google’s Quora account appears to have been hacked by a group called OurMine, which previously broke into Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest accounts earlier this month.
The three-man hacker outfit has been posting messages on Quora through Pichai’s account; it’s also connected to his Twitter account and as a result, OurMine was able to publicize their hack to all 508,000 of his followers. The tweets have now been removed, but we’ve got a screenshot.
The hacker group, OurMine has been targeting major tech execs of late, including Spotify’s Daniel Ek. It isn’t clear how the group is gaining access to their accounts, but it likely doesn’t involve system breaches of the social networks their targets have accounts with.
Instead, the group claims that it uses various exploits to pull passwords from celebrities’ browsers.
OurMine is attempting to rebrand itself as a ‘security firm‘ and offering its support to those it targets so that these incidents don’t occur again. It’s probably not the best way to garner your potential customers’ trust, but that’s the way OurMine seems to enjoy doing business.
As a precaution, we recommend you change your Quora password, disconnect your account from any other services it might be connected to (such as Facebook and Twitter), and make sure you don’t use it on any other online services.
OurMine, which has an official website that positions the group as a security firm, also said they never change people’s passwords, and that all they’re doing is “testing” people’s security. While their methods are shady to say they least, they’ve definitely been successful in taking control of some high profile social accounts, their recent targets including Twitter co-founder Evan Williams as well as musicians Deadmau5 and David Guetta.