BuzzFeed hacked by group after outing an alleged member

A hacker, or hackers, altered articles on the website BuzzFeed early Wednesday morning in an apparent response to an article alleging that a Saudi teenager is behind hacks on a series of celebrity accounts.  

BuzzFeed tweeted: “The hacking group OurMine altered several posts on http://BuzzFeed.com following BuzzFeed News reporting on the group.”

{mosads}Around 3 a.m., Ourmine replaced the text of a number of BuzzFeed articles — including an article outing an alleged member of the group — with “Hacked by OurMine, don’t share fake news about us again, we have your database. Next time it will be public Don’t [Expletive] With Us!”

As of this posting, BuzzFeed had restored the text of many of the modified articles and appeared to have disabled search results for “Ourmine.”

Ourmine is best known for a protection-racket-type scam. It has hacked websites, including the magazine Variety, and the social media accounts of celebrities including Channing Tatum and tech executives such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg and Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and used those hacked accounts to advertise a personal and business security consultancy. 

Many of the OurMine hacks do not appear to be particularly complex — targeting victims using the same password on multiple sites when one of the sites was compromised. Zuckerberg’s hacked Twitter and Pinterest accounts used the same password that was contained in a breached database of LinkedIn account credentials that was leaked online.