The social media accounts of Facebook were hacked Friday, Feb. 7 by a hacker group, OurMine, raising concerns over the security of the social networks.
At around 3:50 pm on Friday, OurMine tweeted from Facebook’s Twitter account, announcing the temporary hacking of the account. “Hi, we are OurMine. Well, even Facebook is hackable but at least their security better than Twitter. To improve your account’s security, contact us,” the group said in a Tweet.
Both Facebook’s Twitter and Instagram accounts were hacked by the same group, which also hijacked the National Football League (NFL) teams’ accounts before the SuperBowl in January. OurMine is also the group behind the hacking of accounts of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
The group hijacked Facebook’s Messenger account, posting its own logo. However, Facebook’s own website was not hacked. The posts and tweets were already removed by the platform, after finding out about the issue.
Meanwhile, Twitter confirmed that the hacking occurred via a third-party, but accounts were already locked and they’ve alerted the issue to the account owners.
“As soon as we were made aware of the issue, we locked the compromised accounts and are working closely with our partners at Facebook to restore them,” said Twitter in a statement.
Facebook also cleared the issue, saying that the hacking happened but they are already on top of it. “Some of our corporate social accounts were briefly hacked but we have secured and restored access,” said Facebook in a tweet.
According to reports, the recent NFL hacking was confirmed and security experts claim that OurMine accessed a third-party platform Khoros to hack several accounts. Khoros is a marketing platform that businesses use to manage social media communications. Through this platform, hackers are able to access the login credentials of account holders, including passwords.
The temporary hacking of the social network’s accounts happened only for 30 minutes before the accounts were locked. However, Facebook’s reputation was already tampered, as the hacker group claimed that is is easy to ‘hijack’ several accounts, on different platforms.
Cybersecurity expert Jake Moore said that OurMine leaked credentials to the dark web before. “Here, it seems they have used password resets to change account passwords,” said Moore.
OurMine is a Dubai-based hacking group that has long been attacking high profile individuals and companies. In the past, the group has hijacked corporate accounts of Netflix and ESPN.