OurMine, the hacking group responsible for defacing scores of celebrity and media websites in the name of “improving their security,” has dealt a blow to Buzzfeed after the news service outed one of the OurMine members.
In the online equivalent of Wyatt Earp-style vendetta-vengeance, the group vandalized several of the news outlet’s stories this morning, following a story that Buzzfeed published yesterday naming Saudi teen Ahmad Makki as a member of the hacking group.
The group took down the Makki post and left behind a message of their own (now-deleted): “Hacked by OurMine team, don’t share fake news about us again, we have your database. Next time it will be public. Don’t [expletive] with OurMine again.”
The hacking collective has made quite a name for itself in compromising social media accounts of famous businesspeople, including taking over the Twitter accounts of CEO Sundar Pichai, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. They also recently hit Channing Tatum and William Shatner, just for good measure, and in August took over the Twitter account of John Hanke, the CEO of Pokémon Go firm Niantic. It has also defaced articles on news sites like TechCrunch.
In some cases, like with the Zuck, they claimed to have white-hat intentions: “We are just testing people security (sic), we never change their passwords, we did it because there is other hackers can hack them and change everything.”
And, it has tangled with Anonymous in the past.
BuzzFeed said that it was working to restore the defaced articles.