No one is safe on the internet these days, not even the savviest users who sit atop powerful tech companies. After hackers successfully hit Mark Zuckerberg’s Pinterest account earlier this month, they hacked Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s Quora account.
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It became apparent Pichai’s Quora account was hacked as soon as some weird messages started showing up. These weren’t your usual hate posts that tend to appear in such hacks. Instead, the team behind the attacked only produced self-promoting posts. Identified as OurMine, the three-man operation is hacking accounts of famous people as security tests, 9to5Google reports.
The messages, seen in the screenshot above, did not appear only on Quora, as they were auto-tweeted to Pichai’s Twitter account, an online asset that has more than 500,000 followers. The posts are gone, as Pichai likely had no problems getting his accounts back. But OurMine certainly got additional exposure thanks to its actions.
So far, the hacking team has hit Facebook, Google, and Spotify execs – they also hacked into Daniel Ek’s Twitter account – showing that they have the skills to bypass the security of social networking accounts. Either that or these execs have no idea how to use passwords that would actually keep their accounts secure.
Pichai probably didn’t pay to reclaim his account, but OurMine has been making money from this sort of “services,” charging as much as $5,000 for “scans” of social media accounts, and other online security holes.
