New York: The hacking clique OurMine has already been responsible for a few high-profile Twitter account takeovers, but the latest may be particularly embarrassing for the company.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had his account briefly hacked early this morning, as OurMine tweeted out a link to its site and a message that it was "testing your security," along with a Vine clip that has since been deleted.
It's unclear what allowed Dorsey's account to be hijacked, although last month, Twitter took the step of locking down some accounts on the service after several million passwords — apparently from other services — were leaked. Similar hacks now include Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg, but Dorsey is a particularly good reminder that not even the head of Twitter is invulnerable.
"All of the OurMine messages posted to Dorsey's account (which, as of 3:25AM or so appears to have been scrubbed of the hacker's tweets), came through from Vine," the report noted.
It might be possible due to the fact that Dorsey had an old/shared password on his Vine account or somehow connected it to another service that was compromised, which could have given "OurMine" access, the report said.
When clicked on the Twitter link provided by the hackers, a message, "The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful" was returned.
Also, the other link that was connected to Vine returned "The record was deleted by the user" message.
This hack has added another name in the list of high-profile people whose accounts have been compromised.
Recently, the group hacked the Twitter account of the microblogging site's co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams.
Soon after the news of Twitter Co-founder Evan Williams's account hack surfaced on Thursday, another report said that hackers might have used malware to collect more than 32 million Twitter login credentials.
According to the report on technology website Techcrunch.com, these credentials were being sold on the dark web.
Spotify's Daniel Ek, singers Drake and Lana Del Rey, professional American football league NFL and actress-comedienne Chelsea Handler have all been hit in recent months.
In early 2015, Twitter's Chief Financial Officer and Head of Twitter Ventures, Anthony Noto's account was hacked that resulted in many spam messages.
Recently, popular career-oriented platform LinkedIn notified about data breach and alerted its 400 million members to stay safe.
Hit by a massive data breach that put nearly 167 million users' passwords and personal information in the hands of hackers four years back, LinkedIn came out with an explanation and steps it has taken to protect users.
(With IANS inputs)
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