Google CEO's Quora Account Was Hacked By Same Group That Struck Zuckerberg

Google chief Sundar Pichai appears to have fallen victim to OurMine, which broke into Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest accounts last month.

The three-man hacker outfit has been posting messages on question-and-answer site Quora through Pichai’s account; it’s also connected to his Twitter account and as a result, OurMine was able to publicize the hack to all 508,000 of Pichai’s followers.

It isn’t clear how the group is gaining access to the accounts of its targets, who largely are tech execs.

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," The Next Web reports.

OurMine later said that it was only conducting a test:
“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.”

The group also noted that it managed to slip into Pichai’s account by exploiting a vulnerability in Quora’s platform – one that it claims to have reported to the company, to no avail.

Quora said in a statement that it doesn’t believe a weakness in its platform led to the breach:

"We are confident that Sundar Pichai’s account was not accessed via a vulnerability in Quora’s systems. This is consistent with past reports where OurMine exploited previous password leaks on other services to gain access to accounts on Twitter or Facebook. We also have no record of a report by OurMine pointing to a vulnerability. We recommend that people use unique passwords for accounts on different services, so that a security breach on one service does not lead to attackers gaining access to accounts on other services. Safeguarding our users is very important to us, which makes security at Quora one of our highest priorities."