It’s not a good week start for Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. No-one wants to wake up to a hacking of their online accounts, but the trouble is even bigger when you’re one of the leaders of the tech world.

It appears that Pichai’s Quora account was hacked by OurMine, the group responsible for previously breaking into Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter account earlier in June,

Formed of three hackers, the outfit has made their presence known on Pichai’s account by posting several messages. Because the Quora page was also connected to Google’s CEO Twitter account, OurMine publicized their hack to no less than 508,000 followers.

Pichai regained access to his account and the tweets were subsequently deleted; however, there are screenshots to prove that the leader of Google has been hacked.

Several major tech executives have been targeted by OurMine of late, and not even Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek was overlooked. It’s unclear still how the group is able to gain access to these accounts, but it probably has nothing to do with potential system breaches of the social networks they have hacked into.

OurMine has claimed that was not the case, and that they were able to get into these celebrities’ accounts by pulling passwords from their browsers (this claim has yet to be confirmed by any of the affected leaders). This was allegedly possible by using various exploits of the browsers their targets use.

At the same time, OurMine justified the hacks as a rebranding method to become a reliable security firm, claiming that they’re offering their services to all of the targets that have been affected by their malicious activities.

Even though it’s definitely an unorthodox way to gain the trust of potential customers, it also seems to be OurMine’s way of doing business. The group also explained the choice of hacking top users of social networks and leaders of the tech industry as a way of 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,” OurMine said.

If you’re a Quora user, the company recommends that you change your password right away; make sure you don’t use the same code across multiple services.
Image Source: Wikimedia