Several of HBO’s social media accounts were hacked by a well-known hacking group dubbed “OurMine”, the group took control of the main HBO Twitter account late on Wednesday, as well as those for TV shows including Game of Thrones.
“OurMine offers companies security against hacking, charging up to $5,000 for a “scan” of their social media accounts, site security holes, and other security vulnerabilities, and advertises its commercial services by breaking into famous accounts.”
The hackers posted the following message on both HBO’s official Twitter and Facebook accounts:
“Hi, OurMine are here, we are just testing your security, HBO team please contact us to upgrade the security.”
The messages have been removed within an hour of their appearance, HBO said that the TV network was “investigating” the hack.
The group has earlier hacked the social media accounts of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek.
It is not known how the group infiltrated the Twitter accounts, but it seems that they found details in the publicly known data breaches of secret information emerging from a hack that occurred in July.
Late last month, the hackers claimed that they stole 1.5 terabytes of data from HBO. A full episode of “Ballers” and “Room 104” have been leaked online as well as a script that’s allegedly for the next episode of Game of Thrones.
After that, the criminals published a half-gigabyte sample of its stolen HBO data, including emails, employment contracts, and financial balance sheets, along with the script of the upcoming episode of Game of Thrones, asking for a ransom—about $6 Million to be paid in Bitcoins.