Social media accounts of HBO, Game of Thrones and others hacked

OurMine, a Saudi Arabia based hacking group hacked the official Twitter account of HBO and its Game of Thrones TV series on Wednesday night. Upon taking over the accounts, the group started sending their signature Tweets asking the HBO to contact the hackers so they can sell their IT security services to the network

“Hi, OurMine are here, we are just testing your security, HBO team, please contact us to upgrade the security – ourmine .org -> Contact,” said the group.

Other than HBO and GOT’s accounts, the group also took over Twitter feeds of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” “Veep,” “Vinyl and “True Blood.” In total, all six hacked accounts sent same Twitters to their millions of followers. Here are some screenshots grabbed by Twitter users:

OurMine is the same group who are accused of using passwords stolen from previous data breaches especially MySpace and LinkedIn in 2016. Since then, the group has hijacked social media accounts of top celebrities, CEOs, media outlets including Google’s CEO Sunder Pichai (1), Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey (2), Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (3), Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales (4), Variety magazine (5), BuzzFeed (6), Business Insider (7).

The same group also compromised Unity 3D Forums (8), YouTube accounts (9), Twitter accounts of BBC and NYT (10), National Geographic (11), Netflix and Marvel (12), Vine account of ex-PlayBoy model Amanda Cerny (13) and Twitter account of Pokémon Go’s Developer (14).

Last two months have been a hell for HBO:

HBO is under non-stop cyber attack since July this year. Starting with a hacking group called Mr. Smith who stole a trove of HBO data and leaked personal details of Viviane Eisenberg, the Executive Vice President Legal Affairs for Home Box Office, Inc.

Then a Reddit account uploaded the unaired episode 4 of Game of Throne’s season 7, however, later on, authorities in India arrested four people for uploading the episode on the Internet. It turned out it was an inside job.

But the nightmare didn’t end there. A day before yesterday, HBO Spain aired episode 6 of Game of Thrones’ season 7 which was supposed to be broadcast after six days of the incident. The episode remained online for 1 hour giving users enough time to rip and share over the Internet including Torrenting platforms.

At the time of publishing this article, all hijacked accounts were restored. Let’s see what’s next for HBO in the loop.