Less than a week before the Super Bowl is set to kick off in Miami, a Dubai-based group hacked the official social media accounts of the NFL and a number of the league’s teams, including the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers.
The attacks, which were pulled off on Sunday and Monday, were perpetrated by the hacking group OurMine and targeted the Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts for the Super Bowl participants as well as NFL teams including the Bears, Packers, Texans, Bills and Texans.
Though the message differed slightly from team to team, many of the accounts displayed the following message: “Hi, we’re back. We are here to show people that everything is hackable.”
Was the @NFL Twitter just hacked? pic.twitter.com/cUqW3R7Bnb
— Benjamin Cure (@bennycurestud) January 27, 2020
A hacking group called "OurMine has hacked the #Bears, #Packers, #Chiefs and #NFL twitter accounts. pic.twitter.com/JoUGqPWRHP
— NFL Update (@MySportsUpdate) January 27, 2020
Twitter, which deactivated OurMine’s account, confirmed the hack had taken place.
“As soon as we were made aware of the issue, we locked the compromised accounts and are working closely with our partners at the NFL to restore them,” Twitter told the BBC.
Prior to the attack, OurMine reached out to the NFL to offer its services in improving the league’s security, the group told the BBC.
A longtime thorn in the side of the establishment, OurMine rose to prominence in 2016 by infiltrating the Twitter accounts of several top tech executives including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
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